“思想是我们感情的阴影——总是更黑暗、更空虚、更简单。”

‘Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler.’

弗里德里希·尼采，快乐的科学

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, THE JOYFUL SCIENCE

大多数人知道勒内·笛卡尔的“我思故我在”（E go cogito, ergo sum），而不是他的动物实验，但这两者之间有着深刻的联系：笛卡尔认为人类与非人类有着根本的不同，这种不同归根结底在于我们拥有理性的灵魂，这一点可以通过语言得到证明。他的“野兽机器”假说认为动物只是机械装置，与当时流行的液压雕像非常相似，它们可以四处移动，但缺乏“理性的灵魂”——所以你几乎可以对它们做任何你想做的事情。

Most people know René Descartes for ‘I think, therefore I am’ (Ego cogito, ergo sum) rather than his experiments on animals, but there’s a profound connection between the two: Descartes believed that humans were fundamentally different to non-humans, and that the difference boiled down to our possession of rational souls, this being evidenced by language. His ‘beast-machine’ hypothesis proposed that animals were mere mechanisms, and much like the hydraulic statues popular at the time they moved around but lacked ‘rational souls’ – so you could do pretty much whatever you liked to them.

灵魂与理性之间的联系这一观点由来已久。古希腊哲学家亚里士多德认为，灵魂有三种：植物灵魂（植物有）、感性灵魂（动物有）和理性灵魂（我们有）。在他看来，人类拥有这三种灵魂，排列起来有点像俄罗斯套娃。我们与动物的区别在于，虽然我们拥有动物的灵魂，这种灵魂在某种程度上是本能的和情感的，但我们拥有这种理性灵魂，它是永恒的、神一般的。

This idea, of the connection between soul and reason, goes back a long way. The Greek philosopher Aristotle believed there were three kinds of soul: the vegetative soul (that plants have), the sensitive soul (that animals have) and the rational soul (that we have). In his view, humans have all three, arranged a bit like Russian dolls. What sets us apart from animals is that although we have the soul of an animal which is somehow instinctive and emotional, we have this rational soul which is immortal and godlike, on top.

人类与其他动物确实常常看起来截然不同——看看你周围：我们有汽车和 iPhone，而它们还在泥土里摸索。谁能否认我们的差异呢？

It does often seem that humans are quite different from other animals – just look around you: we have cars and iPhones, whilst they are still snuffling around in the dirt. Who could deny our differences?

人们往往忽略的是，直到几千年前，我们也只是在泥土中摸索——只是另一种靠棍棒和石头勉强维持生计的猴子。事实上，我们甚至不是一只特别成功的猴子。

What people tend to overlook is that until a few thousand years ago we were also just snuffling around in the dirt – just another type of monkey scraping a living with sticks and stones. Not even an especially successful monkey, as it happens.

从那时起我们就“进化”了，这也不是真的——进化是一个缓慢的过程，人类在过去的 7 万年左右的时间里并没有发生太大的生物学变化。在大部分时间里，我们只是一群猿类，其主要特征是复杂的群体本能。是的，我们拥有大脑，但我们主要用它来追踪我们的社交圈。据我们所知，这就是现代黑猩猩用它们的大脑做的事情——与 Instagram 上的大多数人一样。

Neither is it true that we have ‘evolved’ since then – evolution is a slow process and humans haven’t changed much biologically in the last 70,000 years or so. For most of that time we were just groups of apes whose principal distinction was their complex herd instinct. Yes, we had big brains, but we were using that mainly to keep track of our social circles. So far as we can tell this is what modern-day chimps are doing with their big brains – together with most of the people on Instagram.

这是一个有趣的想法，不是吗：如果我们使用时光机将 7 万年前出生的孩子与今天出生的孩子交换，没有人会注意到任何异常，而且他们都将完美地融入周围的世界？

It’s an intriguing thought, isn’t it: that if we were to use a time machine to swap a child born 70,000 years ago with one born today, no one would notice anything unusual and both would grow up fitting perfectly into the world around them?

那么，这段时间发生了什么变化？数十万年前，我们发现了一个技巧：讲故事。如果我们能发出反映我们经历的声音，那么我们就可以将它们传承下来。这意味着我们的亲戚可以从我们的经历中受益，并且（除其他外）不会犯同样的错误。

So what changed in that time? Hundreds of thousands of years ago we discovered a trick: telling stories. If we could make sounds that reflected our experiences, then we could pass them down and pass them around. This would mean that our relatives could benefit from our experiences, and (among other things) not make the same mistakes.

讲故事是一件非常无私的事情。关于食物来源或危险的信息非常有价值——你必须是一个非常有自我牺牲精神的人才能讲故事，或者把这些故事画在洞穴的墙壁上。但是一旦每个人都开始讲故事，你就有了一种类似于集体记忆的东西——你就有了一种文化。文化可以是一种有用的适应。

Telling a story is a remarkably altruistic thing to do. Information about food sources or danger is extremely valuable – you’d have to be a very self-sacrificing creature to tell a story, or to paint those stories on the walls of caves. But once everyone starts telling stories you have something like a collective memory – you have a culture. And a culture can be a useful adaptation.

讲故事并不是文化得以活跃的唯一方式——但它无疑有很大帮助。人类能够创作故事并超越其他物种的能力类似于歌曲：更具体地说，是一种发出反映我们感受的声音的能力。而且不是任何一种感受；而是一种极其微妙的万花筒般的感受——适合各种场合的感受。

Telling stories is not the only way a culture can spring to life – but it’s certainly a big help. The ability that enabled humans to compose our stories and leapfrog other species was something like song: more specifically, a capacity for making sounds that reflected what we were feeling. And not just any feeling; an extraordinarily subtle kaleidoscope of feelings – feelings for every occasion.

2010 年，心理学家约翰·皮利 (John Pilley) 和艾莉森·里德 (Allison Reid) 发表了他们对边境牧羊犬 Chaser 的研究结果。Chaser 已经学会了一千多个物体的名称。4^更重要的是，他们表明 Chaser 能够理解词语指的是物体⁵ — 而不仅仅是行为线索。

In 2010 the psychologists John Pilley and Allison Reid published the results of their research with Chaser, a border collie, who had learned the names of over a thousand objects.⁴ More importantly, they showed that Chaser was able to understand that words refer to objects⁵ – rather than just being behavioural cues.

但是，虽然 Chaser 能用 1,000 个词，但普通人能用大约 30,000 个词。我们将声音与情感联系起来的惊人能力是我们语言和文化的基础。这也是音乐在当今所有文化中都扮演着如此重要角色的原因。换句话说：声音可以让我们感受到某种东西，而我可以感受到某种东西并发出声音。

But while Chaser could use 1,000 words, a typical human uses around 30,000. Our amazing ability to tie a sound to a sentiment is the foundation on which our language and culture depend. It is also the reason why music plays such a big part in our lives today, across all cultures. In other words: a sound can make us feel something, and I can feel something and make a sound.

由于这种天生的机制，我们可以交流——甚至在某种程度上与其他物种交流。我尖叫，你尖叫——我们都会尖叫，但虽然你的狗会被你的尖叫声惊吓到，但你的电脑绝对不会。你的电脑不会也永远不会使用文字，它只是假装使用。在语言一章中，我们将看到，文字实际上并不指代事物——相反，它们是情感的表达。

Because of this innate mechanism we can communicate – even with other species to some extent. I scream, you scream – we all scream, but whilst your dog will be alarmed by your screams, your computer most certainly will not. Your computer does not and never will use words, it can only ever appear to. In the chapter on language we will see that words do not actually refer to things – instead they are expressions of sentiments.

很多物种都会做这样的事，最显著的是鸟类。不起眼的蜜蜂也会讲故事来分享信息——只是它们以舞蹈的形式来分享。一只蜜蜂可以与其他蜜蜂分享它的经历。

There are many species that do something like this, most notably birds. The humble honeybee also tells stories as a way of sharing information – only they do so in the form of dance. A single bee can share what it has experienced with other bees.

顺便说一句，这里有一个大问题：显然我们的蜜蜂不会分享它经历过的一切。那么蜜蜂会分享哪些部分呢？当然是那些重要的部分。不同的事物对不同的蜜蜂重要吗？可能不是——重要的东西可能是“硬编码的”，否则一只古怪的蜜蜂可能会讲一个完全无用的故事，说它在途中发现了一个不寻常的塑料桶，并让它的追随者们丧命。请注意，这与你问你的朋友周末过得怎么样时他们所做的有多么相似——他们不会告诉你他们在 60 度的旋转循环中洗裤子，让你无聊得要死。他们会告诉你那些重要的事情。

By the way, here’s a big question: obviously our bee doesn’t share everything it has experienced. So which bits does the bee share? The bits that matter, of course. Do different things matter to different bees? Probably not – probably what matters is ‘hard coded’, otherwise an eccentric bee might tell an entirely useless story about an unusual plastic bucket he spotted en route, and send his followers to their deaths. Notice how similar this is to what your friend does when you ask them about their weekend – they don’t tell you about washing their pants on a 60 degree spin cycle, causing you to die of boredom. They tell you about the bits that matter.

当然，口头传统也存在一些问题：如果你想讲述越来越有用、越来越复杂的故事，你需要对不同的事情使用略有不同的声音。此外，故事在讲述过程中往往会发生一些变化。这在大多数情况下是可以接受的，因为重要的事情——真正重要的事情，比如“那个山洞里住着一只熊”——得到了保留。

Of course an oral tradition suffers from some problems: you need subtly different sounds for different things if you want to tell increasingly useful, complicated stories. Also, the stories tend to change a bit in the telling. Mostly this is OK, because the important things – the things that really matter, like ‘There’s a bear living in that cave’ – get preserved.

因此，故事在人类学习中发挥着核心作用——我们将在下一章中进行探讨——但大致来说，我们可以说故事是人类存储和分享经验的默认方式。

Stories have a central role to play in human learning, therefore – something we will explore in the next chapter – but as an approximation we can say that stories are the default way in which humans store and share their experiences.

讲故事的猿人

The storytelling ape

因此，人类变成了一种奇怪的会讲故事的猿类，虽然这很有帮助，但一开始并不是一个巨大的进步。几千年来，我们似乎一直生活在小群体中，讲故事，磨棍子。故事意味着我们的发现可以传播和积累。最终，围绕着共同的故事和密集的食物地块，出现了大型、复杂的社会，人们开始专业化和贸易——例如，一个人想专注于制作篮子，然后用它们换取食物。

So humans became an odd storytelling type of ape, and though this was helpful it wasn’t a dramatic advance at first. For millennia it seems we survived in small bands, telling our stories, and sharpening sticks. Stories meant that our discoveries could spread and accumulate. Eventually large, complex societies sprang up around shared stories and dense patches of food, and people began to specialize and trade – for example where one individual wanted to focus on making baskets then exchange them for food.

土耳其城市哥贝克力石阵的遗迹可追溯到史前时期，最古老的部分估计建于公元前 9000 年左右。精美的雕刻和建筑结构表明这里曾是一座神庙和相关神灵，一些权威人士认为这里是一处朝圣之地。

The remains of the Turkish city Göbekli Tepe date from prehistoric times, the oldest parts estimated to have been built around 9000 BC. The elaborate carvings and architectural construction suggest a temple and associated deities, with some authorities believing it to be a pilgrimage site.

由于该结构早于该地区的农耕和牲畜驯养，因此故事作为一种组织原则可能比农业更重要，而不是故事是组织大型农业社会的手段。最合理的说法似乎是讲故事为大规模组织的出现提供了充分的条件。

Since the structure predates farming and the domestication of cattle in the region, it may be that stories took precedence over agriculture as an organizing principle, rather than stories being a means of organizing larger agricultural societies. The most plausible account seems to be that storytelling provided sufficient conditions for large-scale organization to occur.

不管怎样，结果就是不是每个人都必须成为游牧民、猎人和觅食者。对于整个物种来说，这被证明是一种很好的策略，尽管生活在蜂巢中让地位低下的雄蜂的生活变得更糟：我们活得更长，生的孩子更多，但花更多时间做一些没有直接意义的事情。

Either way, the upshot was that not everyone had to be nomads, hunters and foragers. For the species as a whole this turned out to be a great strategy, even though living in hives made life for the lowly drone quite a bit worse: we lived longer, had more kids, but spent more time doing things that didn’t make immediate sense.

这种转变也促使我们学习方式发生了重大转变。在此之前——数百万年来——我们像所有动物一样学习：通过观察我们的同龄人和父母，模仿他们，通过反馈指导我们完成越来越复杂的任务，这些反馈会让我们感觉更好或更糟。同龄人嘲笑我们或父母称赞我们都是强大的动机。

This shift also precipitated a significant shift in our approach to learning. Up until that point – for millions of years – we had learned as all animals do: by observing our peers and parents, copying them, being guided on tasks of increasing complexity via feedback that made us feel better or worse. Having our peers laugh at us or our parents praise us are powerful motivations.

但在一个复杂的社会中，一个人可能渴望过上与父母不同的生活——他可能需要当学徒来扮演不同的角色。学徒制是一种“父母互换”计划，随着活动多样化，这种计划变得有意义。今天我们倾向于认为学习需要大量的阅读和写作——但这​​仅仅是历史的偶然。一个昙花一现；一条弯路。

But in a complex society one might aspire to a different life to one’s parents – one might need to be apprenticed to a different role. Apprenticeship was a kind of ‘parent-swapping’ scheme that made sense as activities diversified. Today we tend to think of learning as involving a lot of reading and writing – but this is merely a historical accident. A blip; a detour.

写作是出于经济需要，作为一种会计工具：否则很难追踪谁欠你什么。这是一种将我们不太适应记在脑子里的东西外化的方式。作为次要的事情，有人最终发现你也可以用写作来记录故事。

Writing was born of economic necessity, as an accounting tool: it was just hard to keep track of who owed you what otherwise. It was a way of externalizing stuff that we were poorly adapted to keep in our heads. As a secondary thing someone eventually figured out that you could also use writing to record stories.

但请注意，有些社会没有文字也过得很好：当克里斯托弗·哥伦布登陆美洲时，美洲原住民还没有书写系统，但有丰富的口头传统和艺术化地呈现历史的方式。他们发展出复杂的社会，不需要文字——所以虽然八卦是普遍存在的，但八卦杂志却不是。

But notice that some societies were doing just fine without writing: when Christopher Columbus landed in America, the Native Americans didn’t have a writing system as such, but a rich oral tradition and a way of representing history artistically. They had developed complex societies without the need for writing – so whilst gossip is universal, gossip magazines are not.

写作很重要，但并不像人们想象的那样重要。柏拉图写道，埃及国王泰姆斯被神托特赐予写作的天赋，作为一种“药方”。但泰姆斯拒绝了这份礼物，认为它更像是毒药而不是良药——而且是某种外来之物。

Writing is important, but not in the way that people imagine it is. Plato writes that the Egyptian king Thamus was offered the gift of writing by the god Thoth as a ‘pharmakon’ (a remedy). But Thamus rejects the gift, observing that it is more poison than medicine – and moreover something alien.

如今，写作使我们的知识不再局限于头脑，而是存在于现实世界中——例如书本和机器中。我们几乎一无所知，但却无所不能。我们喜欢认为，写作让我们变得更博学——但只要回溯几代人，你就会发现，文盲比你知道得多：如何做衣服、如何建造房屋、如何维护蒸汽机、如何耕种土地。

Today, writing has enabled us to shift from knowledge being something in our heads, to something out there in the world – for example in books and machines. We have become the people who know almost nothing but can do almost everything as a result. We like to think we are much more knowledgeable as a result of writing – but go back only a few generations and you will find illiterate people who knew far more than you: how to make clothes, build a house, maintain a steam engine, farm the land.

别自欺欺人了——他们不会为 iPad 而苦恼。不，写作只是为机器开辟了道路。写作确实是一种寄生虫。

Don’t kid yourself – they wouldn’t have struggled with iPads. No, writing merely opened the way for machines. Writing is indeed a parasite.

在学习的世界里，写作提供了学习消除的机会：例如以清单或指南的形式外化知识（有证据表明古埃及人曾使用过这种“绩效支持”方法）。今天，如果你要在超市买 15 件东西，你可能会列一个清单。这个清单可以让你免于学习它们。明天你的冰箱会告诉超市你需要什么，你不必开车、读书或写字。你只需要想“我想要一个披萨”，它就会像无人机一样出现。

In the world of learning, writing presented the opportunity for learning elimination: for example externalizing knowledge in the form of checklists or guides (there is evidence that such ‘performance support’ approaches were in use by the ancient Egyptians). Today, if you have to buy 15 things at the supermarket, you might make a list. The list prevents you having to learn them. Tomorrow your refrigerator will tell the supermarket what you need and you won’t have to drive, read or write. You will just think ‘I’d like a pizza’ and it will appear by drone.

我应该告诉你一些关于人类和他们的故事。就像其他动物一样，人类可以发出与其经历相对应的声音：当你踩到狗的脚时，它会痛苦地尖叫，人类也是如此。

There is something I should tell you about humans and their stories. Just like other animals humans can make sounds that corresponded to what they experience: a dog will yelp in pain when you step on its foot, as will a human.

动物也能发出与它们经历过或期望经历的事情相对应的声音。例如，当狗期待散步时，它会感到兴奋（或者当残忍的主人举起棍子时它会呜咽）。我们与宠物的联系源于对许多事物的相似感受。

Animals can also make sounds that correspond to what they have experienced, or expect to experience. A dog can get excited when it anticipates going for a walk, for example (or whimper when a cruel master raises a stick). Our connection with our pets stems from feeling similarly about so many things.

然而，与大多数动物不同，人类会为他们想象的事物而兴奋；他们从其他经历中编造出的东西——例如，一个强大的人类有点像他们的首领，只是更强大。这些故事具有改变我们行为的神奇力量：你可以告诉一个人山洞里有一只熊，他们会远离山洞。但你可以告诉一个人山洞里有一只神熊，他们会为它留下祭品。

However, unlike most animals humans can get excited about things they merely imagine; things they have concocted from other experiences – for example, the idea of a mighty human who is a bit like their chief, only mightier. These stories have a curious power to alter our behaviour: you can tell a person that there is a bear in a cave and they will stay away from the cave. But you can tell a person that there is a divine bear in a cave, and they will leave offerings for it.

随着社会变得越来越复杂，这些故事促进了社会凝聚力——否则故事就只是：“我的家庭比你的家庭好”，最终会变得相当分裂。

As societies became more complex, these stories enabled social cohesion – otherwise the story is just: ‘My family is better than yours’, and that ends up getting pretty divisive.

“系统 2”：想象力

‘System 2’: imagination

这种能力确实与大脑结构（如果不是大小）有关。本质上，一个简单的生物可以将其体验到的东西存储为感觉。这些感觉的激活（我们称之为“认知”）可用于指导行为。我们记得某些具有某种外观的食物味道不好，因此我们会避免食用。

This ability does have something to do with brain structure (if not size). In essence, a simple creature can store what it experiences as feelings. The activation of these feelings (what we call ‘cognition’) can then be used to guide behaviour. We remember that some food with a certain appearance tasted bad, so we avoid it.

那么我为什么要吃抱子甘蓝呢？答案是，我可以对想象的情况产生感觉，并可以用这些感觉以更复杂的方式控制自己的行为。我可能不想吃抱子甘蓝，但我可以想象如果我不吃抱子甘蓝，我妈妈会多么难过，我对想象情况的感觉可能超过我对当前情况的感觉。

So why do I eat Brussels sprouts? The answer is that I can have feelings about imaginary situations, and I can use these to control my behaviour in a more sophisticated way. I might not want to eat my Brussels sprouts, but I can imagine how upset my mum will be if I don’t, and my feelings about an imaginary situation can outweigh my feelings about a current situation.

只有更复杂的神经系统才能做到这种“感受想象中的事物”的把戏，但这肯定不是人类独有的。如果你有一只狗，你会看到它们经常这样做。它们想做点什么，但它们知道如果它们这么做，你会对它们大喊大叫。你能从它们的眼睛里看出矛盾的感觉。

Only more complicated nervous systems seem to be able to do this ‘feeling about imaginary things’ trick, but it’s certainly not unique to humans. If you have a dog you will see them doing this quite regularly. They want to do something, but they know you will yell at them if they do. You recognize the feeling of conflict in their eyes.

有时他们会屈服，你就对他们大喊大叫。有时他们不屈服，你就拍拍他们的头说“好孩子”（顺便说一句，这也是我们养育孩子的方式）。

Sometimes they give in, so you yell at them. Sometimes they don’t give in, and you pat them on the head and say ‘good boy’ (this is also how we raise children, by the way).

这应该告诉我们一些关于我们认知相似性的有趣信息，我们可以用同样的方法来训练我们的宠物，就像我们养育我们的孩子一样。如果你在想“当然——这只是条件反射！”，那么请继续阅读。我希望你很快就会明白，条件反射依赖于一种更深刻的学习机制。

It should tell us something interesting about our cognitive similarities that we can use the same approaches to training our pets as we do to raise our kids. If you’re thinking ‘Of course – this is just conditioning!’, then keep reading. I hope you will soon see that conditioning rests on a much more profound learning mechanism.

今天，甚至在科学家中间，我们流传着一个关于大脑理性区域（前额叶）的故事，以及它如何干预控制大脑的情绪部分（例如杏仁核）。这个故事从亚里士多德流传到了卡尼曼。我要说的是，这个故事是错误的：在某些新笛卡尔二元论中，我们没有“理性”和“情感”能力——相反，我们完全是情绪化的。我们复杂的行为来自我们当下正在经历的情绪和我们可以想象的情绪之间的相互作用。

There is a popular story we tell today, even among scientists, of the rational (pre-frontal) area of the brain, and how it intervenes to control the emotional parts of the brain (e.g. the amygdala). This story has found its way from Aristotle to Kahneman. I am saying that this story is wrong: we do not have ‘rational’ and ‘emotional’ faculties in some neo-Cartesian dualism – instead we are entirely emotional. Our complex behaviour comes from the interplay between the emotions we are experiencing right now, and emotions we can imagine.

如果有帮助的话，你可以认为我们（或你的狗）有两个“系统”——但它们都是情绪化的。一个说：“吃甜甜圈！”另一个说：“想想你以后会感到多么内疚！”

You can think of us (or your dog) as having two ‘systems’ if it helps – but they are both emotional. One says: ‘Eat the doughnut!’ The other says: ‘Think of how guilty you will feel later!’

在笛卡尔时代，灵魂与肉体的二元论是常态。如果你试图向某人解释“灵魂”这种东西是不存在的，他们会当面嘲笑你：“我当然有灵魂！现在是谁在跟你说话！？”他们会嗤之以鼻。人们很容易接受这种二元论观点，因为它可以方便地将我们与其他生物区分开来。

In Descartes’ time, body–soul dualism was the norm. Had you tried to explain to someone that there is no such thing as ‘soul’, they would have laughed to your face: ‘Of course I have a soul! Who is it talking to you now!?’ they would have scoffed. People readily accepted this dualistic view, since it conveniently distinguished us from other creatures.

如今我们抛弃了这种迷信，取而代之的是另一种迷信：感觉—思维二元论。当然，我们并不认为松鼠的思维和感觉是不同的（毕竟我们是超自然的生物）。

Today we have abandoned this superstition, only to substitute another: the feeling–thinking dualism. We don’t imagine that thinking and feeling are different in squirrels, of course (we are supernatural creatures after all).

这种愚蠢的迷信仍然阻碍着我们，从伦理到语言和人工智能 (AI)。学习专家会询问情绪在学习中的作用，仍然有受人尊敬的科学家在追逐大脑的“理性”和“情感”区域，就像曾经有科学家在我们头脑中寻找灵魂的源头一样。

This silly superstition still holds us back in areas ranging from ethics to language and artificial intelligence (AI). Learning experts will ask about the role of emotion in learning, and there are still respectable scientists chasing ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’ areas of the brain, just as there were once scientists looking for the source of the soul in our heads.

让我重复一下这一点，因为这是本书的核心前提，是理解学习和认知的基础，也是对数千年来西方知识传统的彻底否定：你不思考。你没有思想。你所谓的“思考”是感觉；“思想”只是幻想的感觉。我们有，动物也有，我们不是超自然的生物。人类比大多数动物更善于对想象中的事物产生复杂的感觉——比如未来、运动定律、甜甜圈和他们自己——但我们的能力都不是独一无二的。

Let me repeat this point, since it is the central premise of this book, the foundation for understanding learning and cognition, and a radical rejection of thousands of years’ worth of Western intellectual traditions: you don’t think. You have no thoughts. What you call ‘thinking’ is feeling; ‘thoughts’ are just fancy feelings. We have them, animals have them, we are not supernatural creatures. Humans are better than most animals in being able to have complex feelings about imaginary things – such as the future, laws of motion, doughnuts and themselves – but none of our abilities is unique.

我们利用对想象情景产生感觉的能力来创作故事，这些故事不仅仅是过去经历的叙述，我们还利用将声音与情感联系起来分享它们的能力。故事开始有自己的演变。那些让猿类群体更成功的故事往往能存活下来。

We used our ability to have feelings about imaginary situations to create stories that were not simply accounts of past experiences, and our ability to connect sounds to sentiments to share them. Stories started to have an evolution all of their own. The stories that made groups of apes more successful tended to survive.

事实证明，最具影响力的故事之一是“我们是特别的”的故事。“我们是特别的”的故事有多种形式，但本质上，这个故事告诉一群人，他们在某种质量上比其他一切创造物都优越，因此他们有权随心所欲地使用一切。

One of the most influential stories, it turned out, was the ‘we are special’ story. The ‘we are special’ story took a variety of forms, but in essence the story told a group of people that they were better than everything else in creation in some qualitatively different way, and that they were therefore entitled to use everything as they wished.

我所说的“质的差异”不仅指他们更强大、更聪明、更美丽（尽管这也是一个颇具影响力的故事），而且实际上是一种完全不同的、更优越的存在阶层。

By ‘qualitatively different’, I mean not just that they are stronger, smarter, more beautiful (although that is also quite an influential story), but actually a completely different, superior, class of being.

你知道，当其他生物看起来与你非常相似时，在证据面前维持这样的故事是相当困难的，所以这个故事必须涉及一些超自然元素——一些使他们与众不同的“特殊本质”。亚里士多德讲过这个故事，在他之后的柏拉图也讲过，最近的笛卡尔也讲过；它涉及理性的灵魂。

You know, it’s pretty tough to maintain a story like this in the face of evidence when other beings seem pretty similar to you, so the story had to involve some supernatural element – some ‘special essence’ that made them different. Aristotle told this story, as did Plato after him, and more recently Descartes; it concerned rational souls.

理性灵魂的故事赋予了特定人群各种我们本能地认为令人厌恶的事情：例如旅行到某个地方，寻找与他们长得很像的人，窃取他们的土地，杀死他们并将他们卖为奴隶。或者只是对他们进行非人性的实验以了解更多关于他们的事情。在他们的头脑中，他们有“理性灵魂”，所以他们可以对（他们认为的）“没有灵魂的生物”做任何他们想做的事情，因为他们认为这片土地上的人民不值得更好的待遇。

The rational souls story entitled a specific people to do all manner of things that we find instinctively abhorrent: for example travelling somewhere, finding people who looked a lot like them, stealing their land, killing them and selling them into slavery. Or just inhumanly experimenting on them to find out more about them. In their heads they had ‘rational souls’, so they could do whatever they liked to (what they deemed) ‘soulless creatures’, because they thought the people of the land didn’t deserve better treatment.

在美国和英国，已婚女性在 19 世纪的大部分时间里都被视为财产。人们争论女性是否有灵魂。在那些人看来，她们可能有灵魂，但处于一种粗暴的非理性状态——就像孩子的灵魂一样。心照不宣的经验法则是，某物或某人拥有的“理性灵魂”越少，那些特定的人就越有权用它做他们想做的事。

In America and Great Britain, married women were considered property, by law, throughout most of the 19th century. People debated whether women had souls. To those people, it seemed they might, but in a crude irrational state – like those of children. The tacit rule of thumb was that the less of a ‘rational soul’ something or someone had, the more those specific people were entitled to do what they wanted with it.

快进到今天——我们的整个生活方式仍然围绕着大多数人仍然相信的一个特定的超自然故事：理性的故事。

Fast-forward to the present day – our entire way of life still revolves around one particular supernatural story that most of us continue to believe: the story of reason.

柏拉图、亚里士多德、笛卡尔以及大部分哲学家都认为理性、思想和神之间存在着密切的关系。人的理性将人与神联系在一起，并将人与野兽区分开来：“我思故我在”。

Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and most of the philosophers in-between saw a close relationship between reason, the mind, and the divine. Man’s rationality was what linked him to the divine and separated him from the beasts: ‘I think, therefore I am’.

请注意，笛卡尔并没有说“我感故我在”。他的论点是，尽管我的想法可能是错误的，但一定有一个“我”在思考这些想法。但为什么我们不能对感觉做出同样的论证呢？我对世界的感觉可能是错误的（例如，我可能是罐子里的大脑），但一定有一个“我”在感知它们。

Notice that Descartes did not say ‘I feel, therefore I am’. His argument was that although my thoughts might be wrong, there must be an ‘I’ that thinks them. But why couldn’t we make the same argument for feelings? My sensations of the world might be wrong (I might, for example, be a brain in a jar), but there must be an ‘I’ that senses them.

笛卡尔没有提出这个论点是有充分理由的：他有点狡猾。讽刺的是，“我思故我在”中的“我思”部分实际上没有理由存在。它与结论没有任何逻辑关系。

There’s a good reason why Descartes didn’t make this argument: he was being a bit sneaky. Ironically there is actually no reason for the ‘I think’ bit of ‘I think, therefore I am’ to be there. It bears no logical relation to the conclusion.

在笛卡尔之前几个世纪，圣奥古斯丁就曾提出，在所有可以怀疑的事物中，我不能怀疑“我是”——笛卡尔也非常了解他的著作。但笛卡尔是一个（病态的）理性的人，擅长理性的事情，他想主张理性的首要地位，并以此按照自己的形象重塑世界。所以他把“我认为”加到了陈述中，就像一个人把他的小艇拴在奥古斯丁的游轮上一样。他同样可以说“我感觉，所以我是”。思考有什么大不了的？

Centuries before Descartes, St Augustine had argued that of all the things one can doubt, I cannot doubt that ‘I am’ – and Descartes was well aware of his writings. But Descartes was a (pathologically) rational man, good at rational things, who wanted to assert the primacy of reason and in so doing recreate the world in his own image. So he added ‘I think’ onto the statement like a bloke hitching his dinghy to Augustine’s cruise ship. He could equally have said ‘I feel, therefore I am.’ What was the big deal about thinking?

正如我们所见，亚里士多德认为动物和人类都拥有一种感觉，即“敏感的”灵魂。笛卡尔似乎在很多地方都承认动物有“感觉”。因此，尽管“我感觉，故我在”在哲学上同样有意义，但我们无法拥有它。“感觉”不能与灵魂和上帝联系起来。

As we saw, Aristotle believed that animals and humans alike possess a feeling, ‘sensitive’ soul. At various points it seems Descartes admits that animals have ‘sensations’. So although ‘I feel, therefore I am’ makes just as much sense philosophically speaking – we can’t have it. ‘Feelings’ cannot be linked to the soul, and to God.

尽管我们不再相信灵魂，但我们仍然相信理性和思想——这至少将我们与动物区分开来。我们思考，动物感觉。我们比动物优越。再吃一个汉堡吧。

And whilst we stopped believing in souls, we carried on believing in reason and thought – this, at least, separated us from the animals. We think, they feel. We are superior. Have another hamburger.

但如果你认为我在为动物权利辩护，请让我提醒你，这不是我的主要意图。我试图表达一些关于人类的更根本的东西——一些对我们理解学习、认知、语言、关系、道德、文化、政治、社交媒体、营销和人工智能（仅举几个领域）有影响的东西：你不思考。你从未思考过。你只感觉到过……

But in case you think I am making an argument for animal rights, let me remind you that that is not my central intention. I am trying to say something far more fundamental about people – something with implications for our understanding of learning, cognition, language, relationships, ethics, culture, politics, social media, marketing and AI (to name but a few areas): you don’t think. You have never thought. You have only ever felt.

情感情境模型

The affective context model

支撑我们对自身理解（实际上是对所有生物的理解）这一根本性转变的理论被称为情感情境模型。是的，我知道这个模型不太好记。它的核心是，所有认知都是情感反应的变体——可以追溯到最早的神经系统和我们的原始祖先。

The theory that underpins this radical shift in our understanding of ourselves – in fact our understanding of all creatures – is called the affective context model. Yes, I know it’s not very catchy. The heart of it is that all cognition is a variation of affective response – reaching all the way back to the earliest nervous systems and our primordial ancestors.

如果这听起来很奇怪，我想问一下：如果认为人类的头脑中存在某种特殊的、完全不同类型的活动，而其他生物都没有这种活动，这不是更奇怪吗？

In case this sounds odd, I would like to ask: is it not much odder to think that humans have some special, entirely different type of activity going on in their heads that no other creature possesses?

为什么我们要谈论人类大脑中的“理性”和“情感”中心？我们不会这样描述老鼠的大脑。我们认为狗会将理性和情感分开吗？我们如此轻易地接受人类大脑将理性和情感分开，而其他动物的大脑却不会这样做，这难道不奇怪吗？

Why do we talk about ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’ centres in the human brain? We don’t describe the brains of rats like this. Do we think dogs separate reason and emotion? Has it never struck you as strange that we so easily accept that human brains separate reason and emotion, in a way that no other animal’s brains do?

哦，天哪。看来你是一场精心策划的骗局的受害者，我想你需要花些时间才能适应这种想法。动物有感觉，人类有感觉，我们开始将一些更复杂的感觉称为“想法”，然后我们陷入了陷阱，认为思考和感觉在某种程度上是不同的。整个西方知识传统都建立在思考和感觉截然不同的观念上，这简直是胡言乱语。

Oh dear. It seems you are the victim of an elaborate scam, and I expect that thought will take some getting used to. Animals have feelings, humans have feelings, we started calling some of the more sophisticated feelings ‘thoughts’ and then we fell into the trap of believing thinking and feeling were different somehow. An entire Western intellectual tradition based on the idea that thinking and feeling are distinct is mumbo-jumbo.

没有任何逻辑理由或依据可以认为人类的思维方式与我们的近亲有根本的不同——达尔文令人信服地提出了这一点，神经科学也为此提供了大量证据。

There is no logical reason or basis for thinking that human minds operate in a fundamentally different fashion to those of our close relatives – Darwin made that point convincingly, and neuroscience has provided abundant evidence to that end.

但这并不是说服的运作方式，即使对于哲学家来说也是如此；说服的关键在于我能让你感受到什么。（当然，如果这能让你感觉好些，我可以假装这一切都是完全合乎逻辑的。在我们的文化中，强烈的感情与某事是“合乎逻辑的”这一概念联系在一起。）

But this is not how persuasion works, even for philosophers; it’s all about what I can make you feel. (Of course I can pretend that it’s all perfectly logical, if that makes you feel better. In our culture strong feelings are attached to the notion that something is ‘logical’.)

这种对思维的混淆导致了非常现代的后果，我们稍后会谈到：想象人类本质上是“思考的事物”是一条滑坡的顶端，这条滑坡导致我们认为我们基本上是可以被计算机复制或上传到云端的算法。就这样，灵魂不朽的流行宗教观念通过熟悉的好莱坞故事情节偷偷进入了我们的技术时代。

There’s a very modern consequence of this confusion about thinking, which we will come to in a bit: imagining that humans were, in essence, ‘thinking things’ was the top of a slippery slope that led to us thinking that we were basically algorithms that could be reproduced by a computer or uploaded to the cloud. In this way, the popular religious idea of an immortal soul was smuggled into our technological present via familiar Hollywood storylines.

相比之下，如果我们坚持认为人类是有感觉的，那么如何将有感觉的“你”移植到没有感觉的机器上就不那么清楚了。讽刺的是，我们最大的担忧之一就是人工智能会表现得像一个（笛卡尔式的）精神病患者——理性地应用规则，完全无视情感。

By contrast, had we stuck with the idea of humans as feeling things, it would be much less clear how the ‘you’ that feels could be transplanted onto a machine that doesn’t. Ironically, one of our greatest fears is that AI will behave like a (Cartesian) psychopath – applying rules rationally, with complete disregard for emotion.

在学习的世界里，这种传染性谎言带来了灾难性的后果：把人看作是数据存储机制——就像书籍或电脑一样——使所有形式或曲折的做法合法化；统称为“教育”。我们不允许人们像平常一样（所有生物都是这样）从自己的经验中学习，而是建立了一个规模空前的全球官僚机构，从对我们的后代施加巨大的剥夺中获利，强迫他们坐下来，闭嘴，记住毫无意义的信息来证明他们的服从。

In the world of learning, this infectious lie had catastrophic consequences: thinking about people as if they were data storage mechanisms – like books or computers – legitimized all manner or tortuous practices; collectively called ‘education’. Instead of allowing people to learn as they normally would (as all creatures do) – from their experiences – we set in place a global bureaucracy of unprecedented scale, profiting from subjecting our offspring to monstrous deprivations, forcing them to sit down, shut up and memorize meaningless information to prove their obedience.

我们试图把他们变成机器。我们试图扼杀他们的学习，粉碎他们的个性。这招从来没奏效，但我们找到了一种方法来从中赚取大量金钱，并在这个过程中伤害了他们每一个人。现在，这台可怕的笛卡尔机器似乎几乎无法阻挡。

We tried to turn them into machines. We tried to stifle their learning, crush their individuality. It never worked, but we found a way to make lots of money out of it, and damaged every last one of them in the process. Now the monstrous Cartesian machine seems almost unstoppable.

但我有点操之过急了。你可能仍然对你不思考的说法感到震惊——这似乎很荒谬……不是吗？正如我之前所说，回到笛卡尔时代，如果你认为人类没有灵魂，人们会嘲笑你：“不言而喻，我们有灵魂！如果我们没有灵魂，我们就会死！我们会像爆裂的气球一样爆裂，我亲爱的朋友！呸！我对我的灵魂最为熟悉——这一点我可以肯定！”人们可能会这样说。

But I am getting ahead of myself. You may still be reeling from the statement that you don’t think – it seems preposterous… doesn’t it? As I said earlier, back in Descartes’ day if you had suggested that humans don’t have souls, people would have laughed at you: ‘Self-evidently we have souls! If we didn’t have souls we would be dead! We would collapse like a burst balloon, my dear fellow! Pah! I am most intimately acquainted with my soul – of that I can be certain!’ people might have said.

奇怪的是，我们的故事——我们的感受——是我们世界的极限。而不是我们的语言。语言只是我们用来表达对世界的感受的声音。请注意，尽管“灵魂”的概念存在着深刻的逻辑缺陷（“非物质的东西如何改变物质的东西？”），但人们喜欢这个想法，因为它让我们变得特别和永生，而且许多人——直到今天——仍然相信它。

In a curious way, our stories – our feelings – are the limits of our world. Not our language. Language is simply the sounds we make to express how we feel about the world. Notice that although the idea of ‘soul’ suffered from profound logical flaws (‘how does a non-physical thing alter a physical thing?’), people loved the idea because it made us special and immortal, and many – to this day – continue to believe it.

“思想”就像“灵魂”一样——是一种超自然的东西，我们发明它们是为了让自己感觉优越，今天我们认为它是理所当然的，但几十年后，我们会在历史书中读到它，认为它是我们无可救药的原始文化的体现。

‘Thoughts’ are exactly like ‘souls’ – they are a supernatural thing that we invented to make ourselves feel superior and which today we take for granted, but which in a few decades’ time we will read about in history books as being indicative of our hopelessly primitive culture.

我知道你非常确定现在你的脑子里正在产生想法——就像笛卡尔的同时代人会“感觉到”他们灵魂的活动一样。你错误地称之为“想法”的东西确实在发生——神经元在放电并形成连接——但它们是感觉，对微妙的想象事物的复杂交织的感觉，由本页上的文字引发的感觉，你可以将其转化为声音的感觉，但无论如何，它们都是感觉。

I know you are quite sure that thoughts are happening in your head right now – just as Descartes’ contemporaries would have ‘sensed’ the activity of their souls. What you mislabel ‘thoughts’ are indeed happening – neurons are firing and forming connections – but they are feelings, complicated intertwined feelings about subtle imaginary things, feelings prompted by the words on this page, feelings that you can make into sounds, but feelings nonetheless.

但亚里士多德从哪里得到了理性的故事？柏拉图将灵魂分为三个部分（而不是两个）：理性、精神和欲望。在他的车夫寓言中，理性（车夫）必须指挥两匹马，一匹苍白而高贵（精神），另一匹黑暗而难以驾驭（欲望）。车夫要去哪里？你猜对了：天堂。从一开始，理性的作用就是征服激情，引导我们走向神圣。

But where did Aristotle get the reason story? Plato divides the soul into three parts (rather than two): reason, spirit and the appetites. In his allegory of the charioteer, reason (the charioteer) must command two horses, one pale and noble (spirit) the other dark and unruly (the appetites). Where is the charioteer headed? You guessed it: the heavens. From the outset it is the role of reason to conquer the passions and steer us towards the divine.

和我们今天一样，柏拉图认为欲望是源自灵魂下层的非理性反应，需要用更理想的理性力量来征服。斯多葛学派则更进一步——试图完全消除情感——但在整个西方思想史上，情感仍然是我们动物本性的可耻提醒，需要用神圣的理性力量来征服。

Much as we do today, Plato views the appetites as irrational reactions emanating from the lower part of the soul, to be conquered by the altogether more desirable power of reason. The Stoics took it a little further – seeking to eliminate the emotions altogether – but throughout Western intellectual history the emotions remained a rather shameful reminder of our animal nature, there to be conquered by the divine power of reason.

斯多葛学派和亚里士多德学派之间的哲学之争在《星际迷航》中的史波克先生和柯克船长之间上演。斯多葛学派的史波克先生几乎消除了他烦人的情绪，而柯克船长则努力控制自己的情绪。随着我们一遍又一遍地看到他们的关系，他们的故事的寓意是，拥有情绪并控制它们比完全消除它们更好（呼应亚里士多德的路线）。

The philosophical battle between the Stoics and Aristotelians is acted out between Mr Spock and Captain Kirk in Star Trek. The Stoic Mr Spock has all but eliminated his pesky emotions, whilst Captain Kirk struggles to master his. As we watch their relationship play out over and over again, the moral of their story is that it is better to have emotions and to master them than to eliminate them altogether (echoing the Aristotelian line).

如今，“思考”与“感觉”截然不同的观念已经发展成为一种完整的文化神话。商界人士会说“我们需要抛开感觉，客观思考”，好像这是有可能做到的事情。教育界人士谈论情感在学习中的作用，好像学习并不完全是情感的问题；想象一下有人说“认知在思考中起着非常重要的作用！”——你会猜想他们根本不理解思考。

Today, this idea of ‘thinking’ as distinct from ‘feeling’ has developed into an entire cultural mythology. Business people will say things like ‘we need to set our feelings aside and think objectively’, as if that were something that were possible. Education people talk about the role of emotion in learning, as if learning weren’t entirely a matter of emotion; imagine someone saying ‘Cognition plays a really important role in thinking!’ – you’d guess that they didn’t understand thinking at all.

科学家偶尔声称发现了大脑的“情感”中心——结果却失望地发现，情绪状态与认知的各个方面都密不可分。神经科学家 Mary Helen Immordino-Yang 在她的著作《情绪、学习和大脑》中写道：“学习、注意力、记忆力、决策、动机和社会功能都受到情绪的深刻影响，事实上，它们都包含在情绪过程中。” ⁶被包含！

Science sporadically claims to have discovered the ‘emotional’ centre of the brain – only to find to their disappointment that emotional states are inextricably linked to every aspect of cognition. In her book Emotions, Learning and the Brain the neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang writes: ‘Learning, attention, memory, decision making, motivation, and social functioning are both profoundly affected by emotion and in fact subsumed within the process of emotion.’⁶ Subsumed!

换句话说，我们称之为认知过程的这些事情不仅仅受到情绪过程的影响——它们就是情绪过程！但是，我们太喜欢这种二元叙事了，以至于我们无法完全理解我们所读到的内容。我感觉，即使现在，你也很难理解我所说的内容。这是为什么呢？

In other words, these things that we call cognitive processes are not simply affected by emotional processes – they are emotional processes! But we have grown so fond of this dualistic narrative that we can’t quite comprehend what we are reading. I sense that even now you are struggling with what I am saying. Why is that?

我们深深地相信人类在某种程度上优于其他生物，并且与其他生物有所不同。我们立即接受了人类的思维和情感是分开的这一观点——这似乎是显而易见的。我们甚至想象“理性”和“情感”占据大脑的不同区域。

We are deeply attached to the idea that humans are somehow superior to and different from other creatures. We immediately accept the idea that thinking and emotion are separate in humans – it seems so obvious. We even imagine that ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’ occupy distinct areas in the brain.

然而，当我们转向非人类动物及其看起来非常相似的大脑时，我们完全不清楚这可能意味着什么。你认为你的狗看到松鼠时所经历的情感与它对松鼠的想法不同吗？你认为 Fido 的情景记忆和语义记忆是分开存储的吗？你认为我们能在老鼠的大脑中识别出不同的“理性”和“情感”结构吗？

And yet when we turn to non-human animals, and their remarkably similar looking brains, it is not at all clear what that might mean. Do you think the emotion your dog experiences when seeing a squirrel is different from his thought of a squirrel? Do you think Fido’s episodic and semantic memories are stored separately? Do you think we could identify distinct ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’ structures in the brain of a rat?

根据经验法则，这是适用于您遇到的任何学习理论的一个很好的嗅探测试：您可以轻松地将其应用于其他动物吗？行为主义可以验证这一点——但成人教育学/教育学的区别如何？我们认为幼犬的学习方式与老狗不同吗？Kolb 的学习周期（表明学习需要反思）如何？您认为老鼠花很多时间进行反思吗？

As a rule of thumb this is a good sniff test to apply to any learning theory that you encounter: can you easily apply it to other animals? Behaviourism checks out – but how about the andragogy/pedagogy distinction? Do we think young dogs learn differently to old ones? How about Kolb’s learning cycle (that suggests learning requires reflection)? Do you think rats spend much time reflecting?

我现在能看出你内心深处的反应：你本能地觉得我们无法比较人类和狗，因为人类在某种程度上与狗有着根本的不同。“我们做事的方式不同”，你的内心想说。你没有理性的基础来支持这种观点，它是反达尔文主义的，坦率地说是反科学的，但你却对这种感觉念念不忘。几十年来，你一直沉浸在这个故事中。

I can spot a visceral reaction in you right now: instinctively you feel that we can’t compare humans and dogs because humans are fundamentally different from dogs somehow. ‘We work differently’, your heart wants to say. You don’t have a rational basis for this view, it’s counter-Darwinian and frankly anti-scientific, but it’s a feeling you are attached to. You have been steeped in this story for decades.

你可以很容易地为这种观点辩护——也许你会把它们称为“理性论据”，以便让那些自认为聪明和理性的人更有说服力，但实际上它们只是一种精心设计的叫喊——一种领土防御。

You can quite easily make noises in defence of this view – and perhaps you will call them ‘rational arguments’ to give them more weight with people who are attached to the idea that they are smart and rational, but really they are just a kind of elaborate barking – a territorial defence.

你可能想大喊“伪君子！”——毕竟，如果理性与情感、思想与感觉之间没有区别，那写这本书干什么呢？但仔细看看：这些词语在你的头脑中被转换成相应的声音（使用心理学家称之为“语音存储”的系统）——每个词语都有独特的感觉，一组情感共鸣。

Part of you probably wants to yell ‘hypocrite!’ – after all, if there is no distinction between reason and emotion, between thought and feeling, then why bother writing this book? But look more closely: these words are converted into their corresponding sounds in your head (using a system psychologists call the ‘phonological store’) – each word has a distinct feel to it, a set of emotional resonances.

微妙的情绪串联起来形成复杂的模式，我们称之为“故事”或“争论”，有时甚至是“歌曲”——所有这些都具有感动我们的力量。我的故事可以感动你，就像蜜蜂的摇摆舞感动了它的同伴一样。很可能我不会说服你，除非我找到能引起你共鸣的东西——或者举一个你能理解的例子。计算机和斯波克先生的运作是合乎逻辑的，而我们不是。

Strung together, subtle emotions form complex patterns that we may call a ‘story’ or an ‘argument’, sometimes even a ‘song’ – all have the power to move us. My story can move you, just as the bee’s waggle dance moves its fellow bees. Most likely I am not going to persuade you until I hit on something that resonates with you – or give an example you can relate to. Computers and Mr Spock operate logically; we do not.

更可能的预测是，你不会相信我说的大部分内容，直到它成为流行观点，即你关心的人相信它。那时你很可能会说：“嗯，我一直以为这是显而易见的。”这就是新思想被接受的方式，也是原因所在。

An altogether more likely prediction is that you are not going to believe much of what I am saying until it becomes the popular view, i.e. when the people you care about believe it. At that point you will most likely say: ‘Well, I thought it was obvious all along’. That is how new ideas are accepted, and that is the reason why.

但“科学”又如何呢？我们喜欢想象理性（以科学的形式）能让我们超越巫师的水平——忘记了科学史充斥着想象的现象：燃素、四种体液、学习方式等等。科学家也爱上了想法，一旦你迷上了某个想法，就很容易找到一些证据。

But what about ‘the science’!? We like to imagine that reason (in the form of science) elevates us above the level of the shaman – forgetting that the history of science is littered with imaginary phenomena: phlogiston, the four humours, learning styles and so on. Scientists, too, fall in love with ideas, and once you have become attached to an idea it is pretty easy to find some evidence for it.

如今，大多数人对科学的认识都很幼稚，认为我们总是在测量和观察事物，积累证据来告诉我们世界的真实面目。相反，科学是关于我们系统地进行测试的狂野想象的故事。所有的想法都会随着时间的推移被证明是错误的，与此同时，相互竞争的叙述在几十年间不断展开。在我们的现代文化中，如果你能装作理性，那么你的说服力就会大大增强。客观或科学，或者可以说“证据”这个词，或者里面有“神经”这个词的东西。在笛卡尔时代，你必须证明你的论点与经文一致。

Most people today have a very naïve notion of science, namely that we go about measuring and observing things, accumulating evidence that tells us how the world really is. Instead, science is about wild imaginative stories that we systematically put to the test. All ideas are proven wrong in time, in the meantime competing narratives battle it out across the decades. In our modern culture you are infinitely more persuasive if you can pose as rational, objective or scientific or can say the word ‘evidence’ or something with ‘neuro-’ in it. In Descartes’ time you had to show that your arguments were consistent with scripture.

对某些人来说，我似乎在暗示 2 + 2 = 4 和 2 + 2 = 5 的感觉同样有效——因为两者都是情绪。需要说明的是，我并不是在暗示：虽然两者都是情绪，但情绪可以排列得或多或少地与世界相似——合乎逻辑或不合乎逻辑——就像可以训练鸽子以合乎逻辑的方式啄食，或者根据大小堆叠石头一样。

To some it may seem as though I am implying that the feeling that 2 + 2 = 4 and the feeling that 2 + 2 = 5 are equally valid – since both are sentiments. To be clear, I am not: whilst both are indeed sentiments, sentiments can be arranged in a way which resembles the world to a greater or lesser degree – one which is logical or not – just as pigeons can be trained to peck in a logical fashion or stones stacked according to size.

逻辑关系是我们这个世界的特征，我们的感觉可能与之对应，也可能不对应。我们与石头或鸽子的不同之处在于我们意识到这种对应性：即我们意识到我们的感觉遵循某种模式（逻辑、音乐或其他）。

Logical relationships are features of our world, to which our feelings may or may not correspond. What makes us different from stones or pigeons is our awareness of this correspondence: i.e. our awareness that our feelings follow a pattern (logical, musical or otherwise).

科学是一种系统的方法，可以检查我们的情感组织与世界组织的对应程度：例如，我们可能会觉得较轻的物体（例如羽毛）比较重的物体下落得更慢。科学提供了一种方法，让我们对世界的内在感受更接近真实情况。

Science is a methodical way of checking the extent to which the organization of our feelings corresponds to the organization of the world: for example, we might feel that lighter objects (e.g. a feather) fall more slowly that heavier ones. Science provides a means of bringing our internal feelings about the world closer to the way it really is.

你可能会认为，如果我们的内在情感世界与外部世界的逻辑关系相一致，这是一件好事。大多数哲学家都是这么做的。在某种程度上确实如此：例如，许多生物都有“公平”感，这意味着他们敏锐地感受到奖励或惩罚的不平衡。但作为一个曾经研究过逻辑的人，我可以告诉你，除非你在编程计算机，否则它在现实世界中并没有多大用处。当你的伴侣心烦意乱时，指出他们推理中的逻辑差异不太可能带来成功的结果（这可能是哲学家希望我们更像机器的原因之一）。

You might think that it is a good thing if our internal emotional world is aligned with logical relationships in the external world. Most philosophers did. And to some extent it is: many creatures have a sense of ‘fairness’, for example, meaning that they feel the imbalance of rewards or punishments keenly. But as someone who once studied logic I can tell you it’s not really much use in the real world unless you are programming computers. When your partner is upset, pointing out the logical discrepancies in their reasoning is unlikely to lead to a successful outcome (and this may be one reason why philosophers wish we were more like machines).

纵观整个历史，我们的星球一直被没有明确逻辑意识的生物所主宰——包括恐龙、细菌和数量远远超过人类的昆虫。进化总是选择不合逻辑的生物，而不是合乎逻辑的生物——我们是天生就行为不合理的生物。甚至可以说，这种不合理性是相当合乎逻辑的：我们的自利偏见促进了我们的生存。

Throughout its history our planet has been dominated by creatures with no explicit awareness of logic whatsoever – including dinosaurs, bacteria and the insects that continue to vastly outnumber us. Evolution has consistently selected illogical creatures over logical ones – we are creatures designed to behave unreasonably. One might even say this unreasonableness is quite logical: our self-serving biases promote our survival.

所有生物都生来就关心重要的事情，逻辑关系很少重要。由于地球上的生命充满竞争，我们自己的大部分认知都用于猜测其他人的感受。那只熊会攻击我吗？那只迷人的雌性会和我交配吗？我能在它注意到我之前偷偷靠近它吗？我在社会等级中处于什么位置？这些问题本质上不是数学问题。

All creatures are designed to care about stuff that matters, and logical relationships rarely matter much. Since life on earth is competitive, much of our own cognition is given over to second-guessing what the other lot are feeling. Will that bear attack me? Will that attractive female mate with me? Can I sneak up on that creature before it notices me? Where am I in the social hierarchy? These questions aren’t mathematical in nature.

值得注意的是，例外情况是：我们的大脑非常善于判断抛射物是否会击中我们（无需在纸上进行所有计算）。显性推理和逻辑的一些最早用途是预测季节变化——如果你种植农作物，这当然很重要。

The exceptions to this are notable: our brains are great at figuring out if a projectile is going to hit us (without having to do all the calculations on paper). Some of the earliest uses of explicit reason and logic were for predicting seasonal changes – which of course does matter if you are growing crops.

在此之前，我们对周围世界的理解通常以神灵的性格来表达——如果你的思维机制是基于情感的，这实际上是一种很好的思考世界的方式。例如，我们可以说“天气女神玛丽亚在春天很伤心，经常哭泣”，以此来编码统计上春季降水量较大的信息。

Prior to that, our understanding of the world around us was often expressed in terms of the character of deities – which is actually a great way to think about the world if your mental mechanisms are based around sentiment. For example, we can say ‘Maria, the goddess of weather, is sad in the spring and cries a lot’ as a way of encoding the information that, statistically, precipitation is heavier during spring.

一旦人们开始贸易，书写和数学就变得非常重要，因为我们开始做其他生物从未做过的事情。只有在有了书写之后，逻辑才变得重要，这难道不奇怪吗？逻辑在外星世界（一个技术世界）中发挥着重要作用。逻辑会让你成为一名优秀的计算机程序员，但却是一个糟糕的狩猎采集者。正如我稍后将要指出的，逻辑和理性根本不是人类的本性，而是外力作用于我们的方式，使我们适应其目的。

Once people began to trade, writing and mathematics became important for keeping track of things, but only because we had begun doing something that no other creature had done before. Isn’t it odd how logic only became important once we had writing? Logic works well in an alien world – a technological one. Logic will make you a good computer programmer, but a poor hunter-gatherer. As I will argue later, logic and reason are not at all human but instead the way in which an external force acts on us, adapting us to its ends.

我们关于理性的故事带来的后果之一是，我们开始崇拜有逻辑的人。我们称他们为“天才”，认为他们具有令人难以置信的推理能力——通常能够进行复杂的数学运算——为人类进步做出了贡献。但这是一个虚构的故事。天才往往不是超级聪明，而超级聪明的人往往过着枯燥乏味、官僚作风的生活。

One of the consequences of our story about reason is that we began to worship logical people. We called them ‘geniuses’ and we thought of them as people with incredible powers of deduction – often capable of complex mathematics – who contributed to human progress. But this is a made-up story. Geniuses are often not super-smart, and super-smart people often lead dull, bureaucratic lives.

我想通过回顾前言中提到的例子来结束本章：查尔斯·达尔文绝对没有那么聪明。他大学辍学了。他的父亲希望他成为一名医生，但查尔斯觉得学习太难了，所以他退学了。他的父亲——决心要让儿子有所成就——为他报了一个容易得多的神学学位，查尔斯设法通过了考试，但他并不真正感兴趣。这是一个即使在今天也很熟悉的故事。

I’d like to finish this chapter by returning to the example I mentioned in the preface: Charles Darwin was definitely not that smart. He was a college drop-out. His father wanted him to become a doctor, but Charles found the studying too difficult so he quit. His dad – determined to make something of his son – enrolled him on a theological degree which was much easier, and which Charles managed to pass, but wasn’t really interested in. This is a familiar story, even today.

查尔斯真正关心的是石头和鸽子。他有点像个书呆子。

What Charles really cared about were rocks and pigeons. He was a bit of a geek.

整个小猎犬号之旅 也只是个噱头。查尔斯只是在那里用生动的谈话逗船长开心——就像现在邮轮上的娱乐人员一样。他甚至不是第一选择。由于他大部分时间都晕船，他在这方面可能也很差劲。

The whole Voyage of the Beagle thing was also a red herring. Charles was just there to keep the captain entertained with lively conversation – pretty much like the modern-day entertainers on cruise ships. He wasn’t even the first choice. Since he was sea-sick much of the time, he probably sucked at that too.

“雀喙”的故事虽然富有诗意，但与他对进化论的思考关系不大，而进化论的产生更可能是因为他对鸽子繁殖的兴趣。你知道，他发现他可以通过几代的繁殖来显著改变他的鸽子，并开始思考如果他能在几年内做到这一点，大自然在数千年内会取得怎样的成就。

The ‘beaks of finches’ story, though poetic, has little to do with his thoughts around evolution which more likely came about because of his interest in pigeon-breeding. You see, he spotted that he could significantly alter his pigeons by breeding them over the course of a few generations and began to wonder that if he could do that in a few years, what nature might accomplish in thousands.

事实上， 《物种起源》第一版包含了大量关于鸽子饲养的讨论，因此他的编辑建议他放弃所有进化论的废话——这无论如何都是一个不成熟的想法——而是出版一本每个人都会喜欢的关于鸽子饲养的书。查尔斯拒绝了。

In fact, the first edition of On the Origin of Species contained a great deal of discussion on pigeon-breeding, causing his editor to advise him to drop all the evolution nonsense – which was a half-baked idea in any case – and instead publish a book on pigeon-breeding which everyone would have liked. Charles refused.

再说一遍——一个人之所以成为天才，并不是因为他有丰富的思想，而是因为他对世界有不同的看法。达尔文是个怪人，对鸟类繁殖和古老岩石着迷。年轻的阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦曾反复思考光速旅行，尽管他在大学里没有通过一些课程，数学也不是最好的（他的妻子更优秀，帮助他完成了一些比较棘手的证明），但他的疯狂想法为他赢得了赞誉。你知道有多少年轻人对这样的事情感到疑惑吗？

Once more – it is not an abundance of thought that makes a person a genius, it is that they feel differently about the world. Darwin was a geek, fascinated by breeding birds and old rocks. The young Albert Einstein ruminated over travelling at the speed of light, and though he failed some of his college courses and was not the best at math (his wife was better and helped him with some of the trickier proofs), his wild ideas won him acclaim. How many young men do you know who are wondering about stuff like that?

而玛丽·居里——历史上唯一获得过两次诺贝尔奖的人——则明显与众不同，而且毫不掩饰。她曾说过：“不要对人好奇，而要对思想多一些好奇。”她当然很聪明，但在一个女性被积极劝阻不要为进步做出贡献的世界里，她不同寻常的决心赢得了胜利：她非常关心大多数人甚至不曾想过的事情。

And Marie Curie – the only person in history to have won two Nobel Prizes – was decidedly and unashamedly different. She once remarked: ‘Be less curious about people, and more curious about ideas’. Certainly she was smart, but in a world where women were actively dissuaded from contributing to progress, it was her unusual and singular determination that won out: she cared deeply about things that most people don’t even wonder about.

如果你看看“天才”这个词如今的普遍用法，你会发现它与一种特殊的思维方式——数学思维有着不成比例的联系。数学被认为是理性的基石，因此“天才”主要通过他们解决复杂数学问题的能力来识别。

If you look at how the word ‘genius’ is used commonly today, you will notice that it is disproportionately associated with a particular type of thought – mathematical thought. Mathematics is deemed to be the bedrock of reason, hence ‘geniuses’ are identified principally by their ability to solve complicated mathematical problems.

美国最聪明的人（据一些记者称）是克里斯托弗·迈克尔·兰根。他的智商估计在 195 到 210 之间（基于主要围绕语言和数学推理的标准化智力测试）——但你可能从未听说过他。没关系，他没有为社会做出任何重大贡献。事实上，他当了 20 年的保镖，并在 2008 年在一档游戏节目中赢得了 25 万美元。你可能会说，记住事实让他受益匪浅。

America’s smartest man (according to some journalists) is a chap called Christopher Michael Langan. His IQ is estimated at between 195 and 210 (based on standardized tests of intelligence largely centred around verbal and mathematical reasoning) – but you have probably never heard of him. That’s fine, he hasn’t made any significant contribution to society. In fact he spent 20 years working as a bouncer, and in 2008 won $250,000 on a game-show. Memorizing facts paid off for him, you might say.

造成差异的不是理性，而是差异——我们对世界的感觉和感知方式的差异。天才可能确实是聪明人，但这并不是使他们成为天才的原因；而是他们的愿意挑战定义他们的大众思维。仅凭这个原因，他们就成为我们未来的创造者。如果我们想要进步，就必须接受差异。

It is not reason, but difference that makes the difference – differences in the way we feel about and therefore perceive the world. Geniuses may indeed be smart people, but that is not what makes them a genius; it is their willingness to challenge popular thinking that defines them. For this reason alone, they become the authors of our future. If we want progress, we must embrace difference.

如果认知是一个完全情感的过程，这会对我们理解学习产生什么影响呢？在下一章中我们将会找到答案。

If cognition is a thoroughly affective process, what does this do to our understanding of learning? In the next chapter we will find out.

“人们会忘记你说过的话，人们会忘记你做过的事，但人们永远不会忘记你给他们的感受。”

‘People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’

玛雅·安吉罗

MAYA ANGELOU

我当时大概 15 岁。我在英国南部的一所贵格会寄宿学校上学。这所学校与霍格沃茨并不完全一样，但如果你从未上过寄宿学校，那么这所学校也算不错了。

I would have been around 15. I attended a Quaker boarding school in the South of England. It wasn’t exactly like Hogwarts, but if you’ve never been to boarding school that’s not a bad approximation.

星期天，我们可以随心所欲地穿衣服，前往当地城镇，乘坐公共汽车前往市中心，花掉我们每周的零花钱。这让人兴奋不已，原因有很多。其中一个原因是女孩。

On Sundays we were allowed to dress as we liked and head into the local town, riding the bus into the town centre, spending our weekly pocket-money. It was terribly exciting for lots of reasons. One of those reasons was girls.

我上的寄宿学校几乎全是男生，六年级时也有少数女生。然而，当地城镇的男生和女生比例大概是 50/50。如果你正在读这本书，而且已经不再是青少年，我想你仍然记得，作为一个青少年，保持酷对你来说是多么重要。事实上，据我所知，我青少年时期的大部分时间都在试图弄清楚如何保持酷。最终我放弃了。放弃保持酷就叫做“成年”。

My boarding school was almost exclusively boys, with a smattering of girls in the sixth form. The local town, however, enjoyed something like a 50/50 split. If you are reading this book and not still a teenager, I suspect you can still remember how important it was to you as a teenager to be cool. In fact, as far as I can remember, the greater part of my teenage years consisted of trying to figure out how to be cool. Eventually I gave up. Giving up on being cool is called ‘adulthood’.

不过，此时我仍非常坚定，正在研究一项名为“色彩协调”的新假设。我不会向你透露技术细节，但从广义上讲，这个假设是色彩协调会让你更酷——在这个特殊的星期天，我将对它进行测试。

At this stage, though, I was still very determined and working on a new hypothesis entitled ‘colour co-ordination’. I will spare you the technical details, but broadly speaking the proposition was that being colour-co-ordinated made you more cool – and on this particular Sunday I was going to put it to the test.

我购买了所有必需的装备：我有一条绿色的战斗裤、一件绿色的套头衫和一件绿色的飞行夹克。见鬼，我甚至还有一双绿色的运动鞋。毫无疑问，我的色彩搭配很协调。

I had purchased all the required equipment: I had green combat trousers, a green jumper and a green bomber jacket. Heck, I even had green trainers. There was no doubt about it, I was colour co-ordinated.

我还记得事情发生的那条街。有两个女孩——年龄和我差不多。也许大一点。她们朝我走来。我感觉很酷。我没想到她们会对我的装扮发出惊叹声，但我肯定在寻找她们敬畏的迹象。似乎有一个女孩看着我，跟她的朋友低声说着什么。她可能会说什么？也许是：“天哪！他太酷了！”

I can still remember the street where it happened. There were two girls – of a similar age to me. Perhaps a bit older. They were walking towards me. I was feeling pretty cool. I wasn’t expecting them to audibly gasp with admiration at my ensemble, but I was definitely checking for signs of awe. It did seem that one was looking at me and whispering to her friend. What might she be saying? Perhaps: ‘Oh my! He’s so cool!’

他们似乎脸红了。这是可以理解的。显然颜色协调起了作用。当他们经过我时，我竭力听清他们在说什么。我清楚地听到了一句话：

They seemed to be blushing. It was understandable. Clearly the colour co-ordination was working. As they passed me I strained to catch what they were saying. One phrase I heard clearly:

“他看上去就像一根小黄瓜。”

‘He looks like a gherkin’.

我买了一张公交车票。我回到宿舍。接下来的 25 年里我再也没有穿过绿衣服（真实故事）。

I bought a bus ticket. I returned to my dorm. I didn’t wear green for the next 25 years (true story).

当你回顾自己的生活时，你可能仍会想起一些比较尴尬的事件。别担心——我不会要求你分享这些事件。你可能更愿意记住别人遭遇的尴尬事件。但在相对清醒的工作世界中，人们生活在对尴尬的恐惧中——这种不幸的事件会在一瞬间将一生的辛勤工作变成一个有趣的轶事。

When you look back at your own life, you can probably still recall some of the more embarrassing episodes. Don’t worry – I’m not going to ask you to share them. You probably prefer to remember the embarrassing incidents suffered by other people. But in the relatively sober world of work people live in fear of embarrassment – the unfortunate incident that in a single instant reduces a lifetime of hard work to an amusing anecdote.

在 BBC 教育喜剧系列《可怕的历史》中，有一个名为“愚蠢的死亡”的短剧形式，其中死神嘲讽名人的死亡方式。死神当着赫拉克利特的面嘲笑他，据我们所知，这位希腊哲学家死在一堆牛粪中^。1

In the BBC edu-comedy series Horrible Histories there is a sketch format called ‘Stupid Deaths’ in which the Grim Reaper taunts famous figures regarding the manner of their demise. Death literally laughs in the face of Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher who – as far as we know – died in a pile of cow manure.¹

赫拉克利特在哲学上是一位杰出人物，他是先驱之一，也许是第一个为我们周围的世界寻找形而上学解释的人。然而，一代又一代的英国学童只知道他是死在粪堆里的那个家伙。你得承认，这是一个相当不错的故事。

Heraclitus was, by all accounts, a towering figure philosophically – one of the pioneers and perhaps the first to go in search of a metaphysical explanation for the world around us. And yet generations of British schoolchildren will know him only as the bloke who died in a pile of dung. You’ve got to admit, it’s a pretty good story.

人们有时会说“失败是学习的最好方式”，因此我们如此努力地避免失败似乎令人惊讶。但我们本能地敏锐地意识到失败可能带来的代价：尴尬和名誉受损。

People will sometimes say about learning that ‘we learn best through failure’, so it might seem surprising that we work so hard to avoid failing at things. But instinctively we are acutely aware of the possible price of failure: embarrassment and reputational damage.

作为社会生物，我们天生就会经历社交失败，就像我们经历伤害一样。2社交痛苦激活的大脑通路与身体痛苦相同。^事实上，可能正是这种天生的本能让我们成为社会生物：如果我们不在乎别人对我们的看法，我们可能会走开，做我们自己的事情。

As social creatures we are hard-wired to experience social failure in much the same way as we experience injury.² Social pain activates the same brain pathways as physical pain. Indeed it may be this hard-wiring that makes us social creatures: if we didn’t care about what other people thought about us, we might just go off and do our own thing.

即使是那些认为自己是坚定的个人主义者的人，也在某种程度上害怕被羞辱。羞耻和尴尬在我们的记忆中留下的印象是无与伦比的。

Even people who like to think of themselves as staunch individualists fear humiliation to some degree. Shame and embarrassment stick out in our memory like nothing else.

学习不仅仅是知识的传递。和其他生物一样，我们生来就记得重要的事情——而作为社会生物，最重要的往往是其他人的反应。但我们的学校限制社交互动，我们的培训课程也是如此。然而——尽管我们付出了所有努力——社交互动仍然是最有价值的学习来源。

There is much more to learning than the transfer of knowledge. Like every other creature we are designed to remember what matters – and as social creatures what matters most is often the reactions of other people. But our schools restrict social interaction, as do our training courses. And yet – despite all our efforts – the social interaction is still the most valuable source of learning.

教育似乎完全忽视了学习，而学习的核心是体验、体验故事以及它们给我们带来的感受。我们陷入了这样的思维模式：学习就是记住信息。但我们强迫人们记住信息的“教学”技巧已被证明是极其无效和不正常的——所以我们必须重新开始。我们需要从一套非常不同的学习假设开始。

Education seems to have completely lost sight of learning, which at its very heart is about experiences, stories of experiences, and how they make us feel. We have fallen into thinking that learning is about remembering information. But our ‘instructional’ techniques for forcing people to remember information have turned out to be terribly ineffective and quite abnormal – and so we will have to start over. We will need to start with a very different set of assumptions about learning.

我在上面说过，人类是讲故事的人。人们对此表示赞同，但没有人能够充分解释。为什么故事如此重要？我们无时无刻不在讲故事——周一早上我们讲周末的故事，讲令人震惊的事情、巨大的成功和巨大的失败。在网上，我们努力抵制点击色情故事链接的冲动。晚上我们花钱看故事。我们把自己的经历变成故事；“如果它不是故事，它就没有发生过。”

I argued above that human beings are storytellers. This is the kind of statement people nod in agreement with, but which nobody has been able to adequately explain. Why are stories so important? We tell stories all the time – on Monday morning we tell stories about the weekend, we tell stories about shocking things, great successes, great failures. Online we struggle to resist the urge to click on links to salacious stories. In the evenings we pay to watch stories. We take our experiences and turn them into stories; ‘If it isn’t a story, it didn’t happen’.

据约翰·奥布里 (John Aubrey) 报道，16 世纪牛津伯爵在伊丽莎白女王面前无意中放屁。他非常尴尬，以至于消失了七年。当他最终回来时，女王迎接他说：“欢迎回来——我完全忘记了放屁的事！”今天，这是我们对他了解的少数事情之一。

In the 16th century the Earl of Oxford was reported (by John Aubrey) to have inadvertently broken wind in the presence of Queen Elizabeth. He was so embarrassed that he disappeared off travelling for seven years. On his eventual return, the queen greeted him saying ‘Welcome back – I’d completely forgotten about the fart!’ Today, it is one of the few things that we know about him.

这一切对你来说都不应该感到惊讶。让你感到惊讶的是，没有人真正弄清楚为什么你记得某些事情，却记不住其他事情——甚至还没有接近答案。我们集体未能理解学习和记忆，这已经对你的生活产生了深远的影响：你很可能已经在一个教育体系中度过了十多年的时间，在这个教育体系中，你更有可能记住尴尬的事件、朋友或鼓舞人心的老师，而不是代数、历史或化学。对不起——我们搞砸了你 15 年的生活。

None of this should come as a surprise to you. What should surprise you is that nobody has ever really got to the bottom of why you remember some things and not other things – not even close. Our collective failure to understand learning and memory has already had a profound impact on your life: in all probability you have spent more than a decade in an educational system where you are far more likely to remember embarrassing incidents, friends or inspirational teachers than you are algebra or history or chemistry. Sorry – we bungled 15 years of your life.

如今，数十亿儿童浪费了数十亿小时，整整齐齐地坐着，浪费时间，因为没有人理解学习和记忆背后的基本机制。关于我们如何更好地存储信息的奇怪而奇妙的理论已经出版了大量书籍。在工作场所，世界各地的企业每年花费高达 3500 亿美元进行人员培训，但几乎没有证据表明其中任何一项是有效的。3^在学术界，每年都会发表大量误导性研究，以支持对学习的根本错误理解；每天都有人发表另一篇论文，认为世界是平的。

Today, billions of children are wasting billions of hours sitting in rows, wasting their time, because no one has understood the basic mechanism behind learning and memory. Volumes are published on weird and wonderful theories regarding how we might better store information. In the workplace, businesses around the world spend upwards of $350 billion each year training people, with very little evidence that any of it is effective.³ In academia, huge amounts of misleading research are published every year, in support of a fundamentally incorrect understanding of learning; every day someone produces another paper arguing that the world is flat.

当然，我还记得一些学校里的事情——比如数学课。我们的数学老师有一大罐茴香球，如果是某人的生日，他会把罐子拿出来分发。有时我们会假装是某人的生日，他也会配合我们。你可以从他的脸上看出他知道我们在欺骗他，他会假装惊讶——“真的吗？马丁几个星期前不是过生日吗？”我们知道他知道，他也知道我们知道他知道——整个伪装过程非常有趣。

There are, of course, things that I remember from school – such as maths classes. Our maths teacher had a big jar of aniseed balls and if it was someone’s birthday he would take out the jar and hand them round. Sometimes we would pretend that it was someone’s birthday and he would play along. You could see on his face that he knew we were deceiving him and he would feign surprise – ‘Really? Didn’t Martin have a birthday a few weeks ago?’ We knew he knew, and he knew we knew he knew – and the whole charade was delightful.

和你一样，我记得很多学校里的东西。但这些内容几乎都不是我在课堂上学到的知识。我不记得代数。不记得微积分。我几乎不记得乘法表——7x8 乘法表我至今还记不住。我得重复多少次？10,000 次？历史、地理、生物、物理、化学和宗教研究——全是一片空白。这肯定让我们感到奇怪；应该进行的正式学习时间似乎远不如教学大纲中没有的非正式活动那么令人难忘？这是为什么呢？

Like you, I remember lots of things from school. Almost none of those things are the information that I was taught in lessons. I remember no algebra. No differential calculus. I barely recall my times tables – I am still pretty shaky on 7x8. How many times must I have had to repeat that? 10,000? History, geography, biology, physics, chemistry and religious studies – all a big blank. Surely that should strike us as odd; that the formal periods where learning was supposed to be taking place seem to be far less memorable than the informal events that were not on the syllabus? Why is that?

如果我告诉你，你认为你所了解的关于记忆和学习的一切都是错的，你会怎么想？不只是稍微错了，而是完全错了，从根本上就错了——甚至连柏拉图和古希腊人的观点都是错的？

What if I told you that everything you thought you knew about memory and about learning is wrong? Not just slightly wrong but completely and fundamentally wrong – wrong all the way back to Plato and the ancient Greeks?

我们对学习的基本理解是这样的：学习是我们将信息存储在大脑中的过程。我们从一个来源（例如书本或老师）获取知识，然后将其记住，以便以后可以回忆起来。

Our basic understanding of learning goes something like this: learning is the process by which we store information in our heads. We take knowledge from one source (such as a book or a teacher) and we memorize it, so that we can recall it later.

如果您认为我在设置稻草人，韦氏词典将学习（名词）定义为“通过指导或学习获得的知识或技能”，牛津英语词典将记忆定义为“大脑存储和记忆信息的能力”。

In case you think I am setting up a straw man, Merriam-Webster defines learning (noun) as ‘knowledge or skill acquired by instruction or study’, and the Oxford English Dictionary defines memory as ‘the faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information’.

但如果我们从字面上理解这样的定义，并将其与我们的学生时代进行比较，就会发现它非常奇怪：我完全不清楚自己获得了什么知识或技能。我仍然会一点法语，但我记得的大部分内容并不是所谓的“知识”，而我获得的技能——例如如何与同龄人互动、如何穿得像个酷酷的家伙或强迫自己在雨天跑步——似乎与我学到的技能（例如解剖青蛙和滴定）并不相同。

But if we take a definition like this at face value and compare it to our school days it seems very peculiar: it is not at all clear to me what knowledge or skills I acquired. I still have a smattering of French, but most of what I remember isn’t really what you would call ‘knowledge’, and the skills I acquired – such as how to interact with peers, dress like a cool dude or force myself to run on rainy days – don’t seem to be the same skills that I was taught (things like dissecting frogs and titration).

此外，我最近回到了我的老学校——参加校友聚会——并对自己对学校的记忆如此不准确感到震惊。学校里有一整套网球场，我都忘了它们的存在。所以，我以为我存储的一些东西，结果只是我想象出来的。

In addition to that, I recently went back to my old school – for a school reunion – and was quite shocked at how inaccurate my memory of the school was. There was a whole set of tennis courts that I had forgotten existed. So some of the things I thought I had stored, it turned out I only imagined I had stored.

我们哪里错了？

Where did we go wrong?

没有任何单一的观点，但 1885 年赫尔曼·艾宾浩斯做了一件极其愚蠢的事，犯下了一个科学错误，其后果我们至今仍在承受。

There’s no single point, but in 1885 Herman Ebbinghaus did something incredibly stupid, committing a scientific blunder the consequences of which we are still suffering today.

他当时正在研究人类记忆，受到一种名为心理物理学的流行新方法的吸引，决定创造一种“纯粹”的刺激来对记忆进行实验，这是一个好主意；让人们记住对他们来说根本没有任何特殊意义的东西，这样他们烦人的个人经历就不会干扰结果。所以他创造了无意义的音节——三个字母的三元组，如 RUP 和 SFH，供人们学习。

He was researching human memory and, seduced by a trendy new approach called psychophysics, decided that it would be a good idea to create a ‘pure’ stimulus with which to experiment on memory; something for people to remember that had no special significance for them at all, so that their pesky personal experiences wouldn’t interfere with the results. So he created nonsense syllables – three letter trigrams like RUP and SFH to give people to learn.

如果你是他实验的参与者，你将会在一段固定的时间内看到这些无意义的音节，然后被要求记住它们。为什么他要故意为他的实验创造中性的、无意义的刺激？

If you were a participant in his experiments you would be presented with these nonsense syllables, each for a set period of time, then later asked to remember them. Why did he deliberately create neutral, meaningless stimuli for his experiments?

他的错误根源于古希腊人引入的思想传统。你可能还记得，他们认为情感是需要理性力量克服的东西，后来勒内·笛卡尔加深了理性/情感的界限，牢固地确立了身心二元论，并将情感等同于我们本性中误导性的生理方面，将心灵等同于真实、神圣的一面。身体=坏，心灵=好。理性=好，情感=坏。

His mistake was rooted in the intellectual conventions introduced by the ancient Greeks. You may recall that they viewed emotion as something to be overcome by the power of reason, and that later René Descartes deepened the reason/emotion divide, firmly establishing the mind-body duality, and equating the emotions with the misleading physical aspect of our nature and the mind with the true, divine side. Body=bad, mind=good. Reason=good, emotions=bad.

如今，我们仍然可以看到这种古老偏见的影响，这种偏见体现在我们对男性和女性的刻板印象中，传统上认为女性更容易情绪化地评估情况，而男性则倾向于理性地评估情况。在西方社会，我们推崇商业或科学决策的“冷静”和“客观”性质（所有这些最终都是伪装的情绪）。

You can still see the impact of this age-old prejudice today in our stereotypes about men and women, with women traditionally perceived as more prone to emotional assessments of situations and men likely to assess them rationally. In Western society we celebrate the ‘dispassionate’ and ‘objective’ nature of business or scientific decisions (all of which turn out ultimately to be emotion in disguise).

因此，艾宾浩斯可能认为他在做一件好事——通过研究“纯粹”形式的信息，不包含任何意义或情感意义，他可以更准确地了解理性的人类思维处理信息的方式。

So Ebbinghaus probably believed he was doing a good thing – by studying information in a ‘pure’ form, devoid of any meaning or emotional significance, he could get a more accurate picture of the way the rational human mind processes information.

但可悲的是，他却恰恰相反。人类是讲故事的人；我们的大脑对事件的情感意义非常敏感。另一方面，我们的记忆力非常强，可以清除一切无聊的东西：没有个人意义的东西。比如艾宾浩斯的三元组。

Sadly, though, he achieved precisely the opposite. Human beings are storytellers; our minds are finely tuned to the emotional significance of events. On the other hand our memory is exceptionally efficient at getting rid of everything boring: stuff with no personal significance. Stuff like Ebbinghaus’s trigrams.

当艾宾浩斯绘制结果图时，他发现（不出所料）大多数无意义的音节在很短的时间内就被遗忘了。艾宾浩斯认为他发现了一种叫做“遗忘曲线”的东西，这是一条陡峭的曲线，说明了信息通常是如何从记忆中丢失的^。4

When Ebbinghaus plotted the results, he found (predictably) that the majority of the nonsense syllables were forgotten in a short space of time. What Ebbinghaus thought he had discovered was something called the ‘forgetting curve’, a steep curve that illustrated how information is typically lost from memory.⁴

但他没有。虽然他没有意识到，但他实际上发现了更重要的东西：记忆与意义息息相关。他发现，对个人没有意义的信息对大脑来说只是“精神垃圾”，会尽快被处理掉。你每天都会这样做：当你走在街上时，每一块铺路石、每一块砖，在某种程度上都是独一无二的——但它们都没有什么特别的意义。你拥有的任何视觉印象都会被迅速丢弃，为重要的东西让路。

But he hadn’t. Although he didn’t realize it, he had actually discovered something far more important: namely that memory is all to do with meaning. He had discovered that information without personal significance is just ‘mental garbage’ to the mind, and is disposed of as quickly as possible. You do this every day: as you walk along a street, each of the paving slabs, each brick, is distinct and different in some way – but there’s nothing especially meaningful about any of them. Any visual impressions you have are quickly dumped to make way for stuff that matters.

此时，明智的做法是承认个人意义显然是记忆过程中不可或缺的一部分。如果他在列表中加入了有意义的三字组词——例如 FLY 或 TEA——他就会发现这些三字组词比无意义的三字组词更容易被记住，我们的故事可能会有一个圆满的结局。

At this point the sensible thing to have done would be to concede that personal significance is clearly integral to the process of remembering. Had he introduced meaningful trigrams into his lists – like, for example, FLY or TEA – he would have discovered that these were far more likely to be recalled than the nonsense ones, and our story might have ended happily.

但他没有。他被自己的信念蒙蔽了双眼，继续研究强迫大脑记住无意义信息的方法。他发现，通过间歇地一遍又一遍地重复无意义的信息，可以记住一些信息。他发现了一种心理上的强制灌输方法。用我们的铺路石比喻来说，这就像强迫人们一遍又一遍地走同一条街。

But he didn’t. Blinded by his convictions, he went on to investigate means by which the mind might be forced to retain nonsense. He discovered that by repeating the meaningless information over and over again, at intervals, some of it could be retained. He discovered a kind of psychological force-feeding method. In our paving stone analogy, this would be like forcing people to walk the same street over and over.

如果您不相信，我鼓励您亲自尝试以下简单实验：图 2.2中的列表与艾宾浩斯的列表非常相似，但其中恰好有 50% 的三元组是有意义的单词，而 50% 是经典的艾宾浩斯三元组。您可以使用此列表，或者如果您愿意，也可以创建自己的列表。

If you don’t believe me, I would encourage you to try the following simple experiment for yourself: in Figure 2.2 is a list much like Ebbinghaus’s, but with precisely 50 per cent of the trigrams meaningful words and 50 per cent classic Ebbinghaus trigrams. You are welcome to use this list or create your own if you prefer.

不管怎样，我希望你找到一个实验对象（孩子们表现很好），并奖励他们在一分钟内记住尽可能多的三元组（例如，每记住五个就奖励一块饼干）。给他们一分钟时间看列表，然后让他们回忆尽可能多的三元组。我敢打赌，他们几乎记不住任何无意义的三元组。

Either way, I would like you to find an experimental subject (children work well) and offer them a reward for remembering as many trigrams as possible in the space of one minute (for example, a cookie for every five that they remember). Give them a minute to look at the list, then ask them to recall as many as they can. I’m willing to bet that they remember hardly any of the meaningless trigrams.

当然，现在有几种不同的方法来解释这个实验的结果——总是有的——但最简单的方法是，我们优先存储对我们有意义的信息，而忽略那些没有意义的。我想你也会发现，这在个人之间是不同的——“爱猫者”更有可能记住“猫”这个词。

Now of course there are a few different ways to explain the results of this experiment – there always are – but the simplest is that we preferentially store information which is meaningful to us, and ignore that which isn’t. I suspect you would also find that this differs between individuals – that ‘cat people’ are far more likely to remember the word ‘cat’.

因此，艾宾浩斯的成就相当于发现了用智能手机敲钉子的最佳方法：他的研究既准确又极具误导性。换句话说，虽然用智能手机敲钉子可能有最佳方法，但如果你一开始就这么做，那你就有点傻了。如果出版了整本关于用智能手机敲钉子的书——成千上万篇关于用智能手机敲钉子的各种方法的研究文章，情况会怎样？你会觉得人们说他们的技术是“基于证据的”吗？还是你会倾向于说“别这样！太荒谬了！”？

So what Ebbinghaus accomplished was the metaphorical equivalent of discovering the best way to use a smartphone to hammer in nails: his research was simultaneously accurate and grossly misleading. In other words, whilst there probably is a best way to hammer in nails with a smartphone, if you’re doing that in the first place you are a bit of an idiot. And what if entire volumes were published on hammering in nails with a smartphone – hundreds of thousands of research articles on the various ways to batter a nail with a smartphone? Would you find it at all reassuring that people say their technique is ‘evidence-based’, or would you feel inclined to say ‘Stop that! It’s ridiculous!’?

就像原始心理学经常出现的情况一样，这种方法显然很荒谬，但并没有阻止它被广泛接受为记忆、学习和最终教育的模型。今天，我们仍然在学校和工作中采用这种野蛮的技术，即所谓的死记硬背⁵，强迫人们一遍又一遍地重复事情，这样他们才能记住足够长的时间以通过考试。然后就忘了它们。

As is often the case with primitive psychology, the patent ridiculousness of the approach didn’t prevent it from being widely accepted as a model for memory, learning, and ultimately for education. Today we still employ this barbaric technique in the method known as rote learning,⁵ both at school and at work, forcing people to repeat things over and over so that they can memorize them just long enough to pass a test. And then forget them.

在我们的日常生活中，许多重要的课程都是第一次学到的。这是有充分理由的：一个必须被老虎咬过很多次才知道老虎很危险的生物不会活太久。一个孩子不需要反复在热炉上烫伤他们的手。当然，有些事情需要几次尝试：但根据经验法则，个人意义越深，学到的东西就越可靠 ⁶ – 我们通常不会重复犯更尴尬的错误（而我们尴尬的错误会永远回响）。相反，如果你必须一遍又一遍地重复某件事才能记住它，这是一个很好的迹象，表明这对你来说并不重要。

In our normal lives many important lessons are learned the first time. There are good reasons for this: a creature that had to be bitten many times by a tiger before learning that tigers are dangerous wouldn’t last long. A child doesn’t need to burn their hand on a hot stove repeatedly. Of course, some things take a few attempts: but as a rule of thumb, the deeper the personal significance, the more reliably something is learned⁶ – we don’t often repeat our more embarrassing mistakes (and our embarrassing mistakes echo through eternity). Conversely, if you have to repeat something over and over again in order to remember it, that’s a good indicator that it doesn’t matter much to you.

记忆以这种方式运作是完全合理的：你的记忆需要高效，所以它只存储重要的东西。但哪些东西重要呢？答案：那些有情感影响的东西。这是一个相当优雅的系统，因为对你有情感影响的东西既可以从出生（自然）开始设定，也可以由你的成长（养育）塑造。当你还是婴儿时，你会经历痛苦，然后生活会带你进入一个你不知道存在的充满痛苦的世界。

It makes perfect sense for memory to work in this way: your memory needs to be efficient, so it only stores the stuff that matters. But which stuff matters? Answer: the stuff that has an emotional impact. This is rather an elegant system, since what has emotional impact to you can be both programmed from birth (nature) and shaped by your development (nurture). As an infant you can experience pain, then life introduces you to a whole world of pain you didn’t know existed.

科学家用“体内平衡”这个表达来指生物从出生起就寻找对自己有利的环境、避免不利环境的方式；在最原始的层面上，痛苦和快乐、恐惧和吸引力引导我们走向正确的方向。作为大脑发达的生物，我们有能力将这些反应细化和延伸到非凡的程度，甚至包括我们对智能手机的选择。当我们意识到派对上有人穿着同样的衣服时，我们会感到震惊。

Scientists use the expression ‘homeostasis’ to refer to the way in which creatures are set up from birth to seek out conditions that are good for them and avoid those that are bad; at the most primitive level, pain and pleasure, fear and attraction steer us in the right direction. As big-brained creatures we have the ability to elaborate and extend these reactions to an extraordinary degree, up to and including our choice of smartphone. We can experience shock on realizing someone at the party is wearing the same outfit.

如果你想让某人记住一些不重要的事情，你会怎么做？好吧，你可以找到一种方法让它变得重要。例如，你可以用痛苦来威胁他们（因为痛苦对所有生物都很重要）。事实上，痛苦经常被用来训练非人类物种。但人类是一种特殊的生物——会经历各种社交焦虑。所以你可以用耻辱来威胁人们——或者用父母的失望来威胁他们。你可以说：“如果你没有通过那次测试，你的父母会对你非常失望。”或者，你可以强迫人们一遍又一遍地重复信息来惩罚健忘的人。

If you wanted someone to remember something unimportant, how would you do that? Well, you might find a way to make it important. You might, for example, threaten them with pain (since pain matters to all creatures). In fact, pain is often used to condition non-human species. But humans are a special kind of creature – the kind that experience all manner of social anxieties. So you might threaten people with disgrace – or with parental disappointment. You could say: ‘If you don’t pass that test your parents will be bitterly disappointed in you.’ Alternatively, you could just punish forgetfulness by forcing people to repeat information again, and again, and again.

强迫人们一遍又一遍地看某样东西等蛮力手段确实会改变人们对它的感觉。理查德·扎荣茨 (Richard Zajonc) 研究了这种单纯曝光效应⁷的一个版本，即“熟悉产生喜欢”现象，并解释了为什么巴黎人从鄙视埃菲尔铁塔变成了非常喜欢它。

It’s also true that brute force methods such as forcing people to see something over and over again change the way a person feels about it. One version of this mere exposure effect,⁷ the ‘familiarity breeds liking’ phenomenon, was researched by Richard Zajonc and explains why, for example, the population of Paris went from despising the Eiffel tower to quite liking it.

你们当中比较开明的人可能已经想到，也许采取更积极的方法会更好，比如将信息与人们关心的其他事情联系起来——例如帮助他人的愿望。我怀疑你们中的一些人正在阅读并接受这段话，只是因为你们可以看到它对你所照顾的人的应用。或者，如果你是一名销售人员，它可能会帮助你理解为什么花时间了解客户关心的事情如此重要。

It may have occurred to the more enlightened among you that perhaps a more positive approach, such as relating information to some of the other things that people care about – for example, a desire to help others – would be much better. I suspect that some of you are reading this paragraph and taking it in, only because you can see an application to the people in your care. Alternatively, if you are a salesperson, it may help you to understand why taking the time to understand what matters to your customer is so important.

有一条定律是绝对牢不可破的：一种关心总是建立在另一种关心的基础上。你可能使用胡萝卜或大棒，但没有人会记住任何事情，除非它与他们关心的事情有关系。因此，我们设计任何旨在帮助人们学习的环境的出发点必须是个人，以及对他们来说最重要的事情。这，也只有这，才是他们学习的基础。

One law remains absolutely unbreakable: one care always builds on another. You may be using a carrot or a stick, but no one ever remembers anything except by virtue of its relationship to the things that matter to them. Our starting point for the design of any environment designed to help people learn must therefore be the individual, and those things that matter most to them. This, and only this, forms the basis of their learning.

可悲的是，艾宾浩斯最终鼓励的是一种虐待形式——他发现，如果你反复敲击它（而不是，比如说，想知道为什么它第一次没进去），你就能把方枘圆凿。如果你向教育界人士指出这一点，他们通常会非常愤怒和防御，并找出各种借口来为做坏事找借口。

Sadly, what Ebbinghaus ultimately encouraged was ultimately a form of abuse – he had discovered that you can fit a square peg into a round hole – if you hit it again, and again, and again (rather than, say, wondering why it didn’t go in the first time). If you point this out to people who work in education they will usually get quite angry and defensive and come up with all manner of excuses for doing horrible things.

从本质上讲 — — 正如我们稍后会看到的 — — 这是因为人们倾向于在情感上依赖惯例，并围绕它们建立一套理由。

At heart – as we shall see in a bit – this is because people tend to get emotionally attached to conventions, and build a set of justifications around them.

记忆与记忆

Remembering versus memorization

艾宾浩斯的一位同代人也对他的实验深感不安。弗雷德里克·巴特利特花了几十年时间研究跨文化信息传递——即不同文化通常存储和传递知识的方式，例如通过讲故事。与艾宾浩斯形成鲜明对比的是，巴特利特认为记忆是一个建设性的过程，在这个过程中，我们根据个人意义和环境不断“重新创造”我们所知道的东西。

One of Ebbinghaus’s contemporaries was also deeply disturbed by his experiments. Frederic Bartlett had spent decades studying cross-cultural transmission of information – the way in which cultures store and pass on learning normally, for example through storytelling. In sharp contrast to Ebbinghaus he viewed memory as a constructive process, in which we continually ‘recreate’ what we know in the light of personal significance and our environment.

在每种文化中，人们都会讲故事。事实上，这通常占了人们交谈时间的很大一部分——可能高达 80%。8在任何文化中，人们都不会例行地记住一长串毫无意义的^符号。想象人们可以通过这种方式发现学习的有趣之处是相当荒谬的。

In every culture, people tell stories. In fact, this is typically a big proportion of the time they spend talking to one another – perhaps as much as 80 per cent.⁸ In no culture are people routinely required to memorize lists of meaningless symbols. To imagine that one could discover anything interesting about learning in this way is quite perverse.

巴特利特指出，通过剥夺刺激的任何个人意义，艾宾浩斯摧毁了他试图研究的现象——记忆。

Bartlett pointed out that by stripping a stimulus of any personal meaning, Ebbinghaus had destroyed the very phenomenon – memory – that he was attempting to investigate.

弗雷德里克·巴特利特是个不寻常的家伙。巴特利特于 1886 年出生在英国的一个小镇，他最初的 14 年都是一个“普通的乡村男孩”，打板球、帮忙收割庄稼，直到 14 岁左右才进入一所私立小学。由于生病，他无法继续上学，但他开始自学。在父亲的建议下，他报名参加了函授课程，完成学位后，他被邀请成为剑桥大学的导师，后来他又在剑桥大学继续深造。

Frederic Bartlett was an unusual chap. Born in 1886 in a small English town, Bartlett spent his first 14 years as a ‘normal country boy’, playing cricket and helping with the harvest, until the age of around 14 when he attended a private primary school. Due to illness he was unable to continue his schooling, but he began educating himself. At his father’s suggestion, he signed up for a correspondence course and on completing his degree was invited to become a tutor at Cambridge, where he went on to take a further degree at Cambridge University.

他是一个非典型的学生——一个乡下男孩，与上流社会精英混在一起，他的同龄人几乎全部是私人辅导的产物。十年后，他成为剑桥实验室主任，剑桥实验室是当时最负盛名的心理学研究中心。我们忘记了，即使在 20 世纪初的英国，教育仍然是一种奢侈品，主要为精英所保留；其他人即使没有接受教育也能学得很好。

He was an atypical student – a country boy mixing with the elite upper-class, his peers almost exclusively the product of private tutoring. Ten years later he was to become the director of the Cambridge Laboratory, the most prestigious centre for psychological research at the time. We forget that even in early 20th century England, education was still a luxury predominantly reserved for the elite; everybody else learned just fine without education.

巴特利特的心理学方法深受他对人类学的兴趣的影响。艾宾浩斯研究记忆，而巴特利特研究“记忆”，他认为这是一个人们在社会背景下重建意义的主动过程。在他早期的一些实验中，他让人们记住军人的图画，每隔 30 分钟询问他们有关这些图画的问题，然后在一两周后询问他们有关的问题。

Bartlett’s approach to psychology was heavily influenced by his interest in anthropology. Whilst Ebbinghaus studied memory, Bartlett studied ‘remembering’ which as he saw it, is an active process in which people reconstruct meaning within their social context. In some of his early experiments he gave people drawings of military men to remember and questioned them about them at intervals of 30 minutes, then later, after a week or two.

他指出，当时（第一次世界大战期间）人们特别感兴趣的事物，比如烟斗、胡子和帽徽，更容易被记住，而且人们脸上的表情也有很大影响——例如，某人是微笑还是严肃。

He noted that things that were particularly interesting to people at the time (during the First World War) such as pipes, moustaches and cap badges were more likely to be remembered, and that the expressions on people’s faces also made a big impact – for example whether someone was smiling or looked stern.

巴特利特还对他所谓的“传统化”感兴趣——一种文化中的故事流传到另一种文化的过程。他采用了一种类似于中国传话的流程，即人们阅读一个名为《鬼战》的美洲原住民民间故事，然后把这个故事讲给别人听，别人再把这个故事讲给别人听^。9

Bartlett was also interested in something he called ‘conventionalization’ – the process by which stories from one culture get passed on into another. He used a process similar to Chinese whispers in which people read a Native American folk tale entitled The War of the Ghosts, then told the story to someone else, who in turn told it to someone else.⁹

以下是他们读到的故事：

Here is the story that they read:

这是一个有趣的故事，不是吗？如果我让你复述这个故事，我不知道你会怎么复述。我敢打赌你不会忘记鬼魂以某种方式参与其中。鬼魂是一个相当令人兴奋的故事主题。

It’s a curious story isn’t it? I wonder how you would retell it if I asked you to. I’d be willing to bet you wouldn’t forget that ghosts were involved somehow. Ghosts are quite an exciting topic for a story.

当巴特利特这样做时，他的发现与艾宾浩斯的发现完全不同——信息是在故事的开头还是结尾呈现并不重要，复述并不遵循遗忘曲线模式。相反，随着每次复述，故事变得越来越简单，围绕其主要特征（例如主角的死亡）进行常规化。人们在很大程度上不熟悉的事情（例如海豹狩猎）变成了人们更熟悉的事情（例如钓鱼）。

When Bartlett did just this, his findings were nothing like Ebbinghaus’s – it didn’t matter whether information was presented at the beginning or the end of the story, and reproduction didn’t follow the forgetting curve pattern. Instead, with each retelling the story became simplified and conventionalized around its dominant features – such as the death of the main character. Things that people were largely unfamiliar with, such as seal-hunting, became things that people were more familiar with, such as fishing.

简而言之，巴特利特表明，人们会根据对他们最有意义的事物来处理信息。我们拍摄照片、讲故事，并根据对我们重要的东西来存储它们。

In short, Bartlett showed that people process information in terms of the things that are most meaningful to them. We take images, stories, and we store them in terms of what matters to us.

与电脑或书籍不同，生物与世界息息相关。我们通过感官以及感官产生的反应与世界相连。这些反应构成了我们理解世界的基础：它们告诉我们应该关心什么。因此，人类不会像无生命物体那样存储或获取信息，而我们在尝试让机器像人一样运作时已经学会了这一点。

Unlike computers or books, living creatures have something at stake in the world. We are connected to the world via our senses, and by the reactions that those senses engender. Those reactions form the basis of our way of making sense of the world: they tell us what to care about. So humans do not store or acquire information in the way that inanimate objects do, as we have learned by trying to make machines function like people.

不管是科学家还是普通人，都承认人类记忆的这一特点：与计算机记忆或书籍不同，我们的记忆非常不可靠。我们只记得一些零碎的经历，有时甚至会编造一些事情。大多数情况下，这没什么问题，我们开玩笑说我们的记忆力很差，但偶尔这确实很重要。例如，当我们目睹犯罪时。

Somehow, scientists and laypeople alike acknowledge this feature of human memory: unlike computer memory or books, our memories are terribly unreliable. We only remember bits and pieces of the experiences that we have – and sometimes we even make things up. Mostly, this is fine – we joke about how poor our memories are – but once in a while it really matters. For example, when we are witness to a crime.

31 岁的史蒂夫·泰特斯是一名餐厅经理，他与格雷琴订婚了。一天晚上，他们出去吃了一顿浪漫的晚餐，在回家的路上被拦下。警察确认他们的车与强奸案中被认定的车辆相似。

Steve Titus was a 31-year old restaurant manager, engaged to be married to Gretchen. One night they went out for a romantic meal and on the drive home they were pulled over. The police officer had identified their vehicle as looking similar to one identified as part of a rape case.

受害者被展示了史蒂夫的照片，她表示，在这些人中，他的照片最像强奸犯。史蒂夫后来出庭时，受害者坚称她绝对相信他就是强奸犯，尽管史蒂夫和他怀疑的未婚妻及家人继续坚称他是无辜的。史蒂夫被带入监狱。

A photograph of Steve was shown to the victim, who remarked that, of the line-up, his was the photo that looked most like the rapist. When Steve later appeared in court, the victim asserted that she was absolutely sure he was the rapist, though Steve and his incredulous fiancée and family continued to protest his innocence. Steve was taken away to jail.

幸运的是，一名调查记者追踪到了真正的强奸犯，一名男子涉嫌在该地区犯下约 50 起类似罪行，随后他对强奸行为供认不讳。

As luck would have it, an investigative journalist tracked down the real rapist, a man suspected of 50 or so similar crimes in the area, who subsequently confessed to the rape.

史蒂夫被释放后，将警察告上法庭。史蒂夫心怀怨恨、愤怒和不公，失去了工作、未婚妻和积蓄。他对这个案子念念不忘。民事诉讼前几天，史蒂夫因压力引发的心脏病去世。他 35 岁。

Steve was released and took the police to court. Consumed with bitterness, anger and the feeling of injustice, Steve lost his job, fiancée and savings. He obsessed over the case. A few days before the civil proceeding Steve died of a stress-induced heart attack. He was 35.

在史蒂夫的审判中，心理学家伊丽莎白·洛夫特斯辩称史蒂夫是虚假记忆的受害者——伊丽莎白对此略知一二。出于对社会有价值的领域进行研究的渴望，她从 1970 年代开始研究记忆，而她的发现——坦率地说——令人震惊。

At Steve’s trial, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus had argued that Steve had been a victim of false memory – something that Elizabeth knew a thing or two about. Prompted by a desire to undertake research in an area that would be of value to society, she had been studying memory since the 1970s, and what she had discovered was – frankly – shocking.

在她早期的实验中，她向参与者展示了一场虚构的车祸的短片，其中两辆车相撞。看完影片后，她向目击者询问事故情况，并会改变问题的措辞。有时她会问“汽车相撞时的速度有多快？ ”，有时她会问“汽车相撞时的速度有多快？ ”令人不安的是，根据使用的措辞，速度估计值相差近 10 英里/小时^。10

In her early experiments she had shown participants short films of a fictitious car accident in which two vehicles collided. After watching the films, she asked her witnesses about the accident, and she would vary the wording of the questions. Sometimes she would ask the question ‘how fast were the cars going when they smashed?’ and other times ‘how fast were the cars going when they contacted?’ Disturbingly, the estimates of speed varied by almost 10mph, depending on the words used.¹⁰

然后她更进一步。她询问参与者现场是否有碎玻璃。听到“碎”这个问题的参与者更有可能回忆起（不存在的）碎玻璃。

And then she went further. She asked participants about broken glass at the scene. Participants who had heard the ‘smashed’ question were significantly more likely to recall (non-existent) broken glass.

在接下来的几十年里，伊丽莎白继续研究人类记忆的一系列问题——她发现，记忆不仅会被扭曲，而且完全虚构的记忆也会被植入——例如，小时候在购物中心迷路的记忆^。11

Over the next few decades Elizabeth went on to investigate a whole host of problems with human memory – she found that not only could memory be distorted, but completely fictitious memories implanted – for example, a memory about being lost in a shopping centre as a child.¹¹

伊丽莎白与巴特利特有些相似，她认为记忆是一个主动的过程，即记忆被创造的过程。她提出，两种信息——事件发生时存储的信息和事件发生后的信息——在事件的重构中结合在一起。

A bit like Bartlett, Elizabeth viewed remembering as an active process – one in which the memory is created. She proposed that two kinds of information – information stored at the time of an event, and information after the event are combined in a reconstruction of events.

我想对她的发现提出另一种解释——这种解释更进一步阐述了我的观点，并阐明了我的建议：

I would like to suggest an alternative explanation of her findings – one which takes this idea a little further and lays bare what I am proposing:

想象一下，你原本应该参加学校组织的动物园之旅。但作为一个特立独行的青少年，你决定逃课，改去电影院。你内心深处的“Ferris Bueller”的崇拜者知道你稍后可能会被问及你的行踪，所以你制定了一个计划。你请一位将参加旅行的朋友做笔记，这样如果稍后被问话，你就可以编造整个经历。

Imagine that you were supposed to go on a school trip to the zoo. But, being the maverick teenager that you are, you decided to bunk off and go to the cinema instead. The Ferris Bueller wannabe in you knows you might be quizzed later on your whereabouts, so you hatch a plan. You ask one of your friends – who is going on the trip – to take notes, so that you can fabricate the whole experience if later subjected to interrogation.

不幸的是，你的犯罪伙伴并不那么可靠。动物园的潦草笔记如下：

Unfortunately your partner in crime turns out to be less than reliable. The scribbled zoo notes read as follows:

• 动物园位于某种怪异的森林中。

• Zoo is in some kind of freaky forest.

• 老虎摇滚！

• Tigers rock!

• 食物真糟糕啊，伙计！

• Food sucks, man!

• 天哪！一个孩子病了，还吐在了垃圾桶里。

• OMG! One kid got sick and he threw up in the trash.

• 爬行动物馆里有大量蜘蛛！

• Reptile house had massive spiders!

事情的结果是，你的父母得到了你可能错过这次旅行的提示，晚餐时他们对你今天的表现异常感兴趣。你咒骂你懒惰的同事——但你的创造力是无穷无尽的。你讲了一个可信的故事，故事讲的是一个位于阴森森林中心的动物园——放眼望去，到处都是松树——老虎、狮子——哦，还有一只可怕的巨型狼蛛。

As things turn out, your parents get a tip-off that you might have skipped the trip, and over dinner they are unusually interested in your day. You curse your lazy colleague – but your inventiveness knows no bounds. You tell a plausible story about a zoo in the centre of a spooky forest – pine trees as far as the eye can see – tigers, lions – oh, and a terrifying giant tarantula.

这部虚构故事的锦上添花之处在于有关同学的细节——“我见过他，但我不知道他的名字”——他吐在了垃圾桶里（可能是因为动物园的食物太难吃了）。你的故事如此令人信服，你几乎相信你亲自去了那里。事实上，多年后，你真的相信你去了动物园。

The cherry on the fabricated cake is the detail around the classmate – ‘I’ve seen him around, but I don’t know his name’ – who threw up in the trash (probably as a reaction to the terrible zoo food). Your story is so convincing that you almost believe you were there yourself. In fact, years later, you actually believe that you went on that trip to the zoo.

情感情境模型对记忆提出了一个激进的观点：我们实际上并不记得发生在我们身上的任何经历。相反，我们储存了对这些事件的反应——它们给我们带来了什么感受——这些反应在需要的时候被用来“唤起”记忆。

The affective context model makes a radical claim about memory: we don’t actually remember any of the experiences that happen to us. Instead, we store our reactions to those events – how they made us feel – and these reactions are used to ‘conjure up’ a memory when needed.

让我重复一遍：你实际上什么都不记得，你只是存储了事物给你带来的感受，并且你利用这些情感印记来根据需要创造记忆。

Let me repeat that: you don’t actually remember anything, you just store how things made you feel, and you use those emotional imprints to create memories on demand.

这与伊丽莎白的解释不同，因为它表明，在事件发生时，没有任何关于经历的感官信息被编码——只有我们对这些经历的反应。情绪反应是你记忆和思想的基石。它们中的每一个都不过是一种复杂的情感反应模式。

This is different from Elizabeth’s account, as it suggests that no sensory information about experiences is encoded at the time of an event – only our reaction to those experiences. Emotional reactions are the building blocks of your memories, and your thoughts. Every last one of them is nothing more than a complex pattern of affective responses.

你可能会认为这是一个荒谬的说法——你怎么可能仅凭情绪反应就能重建你所做的所有细节？好吧，首先，你真的知道你到底储存了多少细节吗——还是你的大脑在欺骗你？试试这个：凭记忆画一张五英镑的钞票（或十美元的钞票）。抵制查找或制作一张的诱惑。只画你记得的东西。很有可能，你会对自己记忆的不准确性感到震惊。

You might think that this is a preposterous claim – how could you reconstruct all the detail that you do, just by using your emotional reactions? Well, for starters, are you really aware of just how much detail you actually store – or is your mind tricking you? Try this: draw a five-pound note (or ten dollar bill) from memory. Resist the temptation to look it up, or produce one. Just draw what you remember. Chances are, you will be shocked by how inaccurate your memory is.

尝试其他你非常熟悉的东西——例如，你家的正面。很有可能你甚至无法得到正确的窗户数量。

Try something else with which you are intimately familiar – such as, for example, the front of your house. There is a good chance that you won’t even get the number of windows correct.

2016 年， signs.com公司向 156 位美国人发起挑战，让他们凭记忆画出著名品牌的标志，比如星巴克。12^同样，如果您愿意，您可以自己尝试一下。结果显示，许多参与者的失误率令人震惊，甚至到了令人发指的程度。他们唯一始终正确的就是绿色和女性的存在。

In 2016 the company signs.com gave 156 Americans the challenge of drawing famous brand logos from memory – Starbucks, for example.¹² Again, you can try it yourself if you like. The results reveal shocking verging on obscene levels of inaccuracy for many of the participants. Pretty much the only thing they consistently got right was the colour green and the presence of a woman.

那么情感情境模型如何解释这一点呢？

So how does the affective context model explain this?

1949 年，神经心理学家唐纳德·赫布 (Donald Hebb) 发现了一个惊人的现象。13^在研究神经元活动时，他发现当两个或同时激活的神经元越多，它们就越容易形成连接。这有时被总结为赫布定律：“同时激活的神经元会连接在一起。”

In 1949 the neuropsychologist Donald Hebb make a remarkable discovery.¹³ Whilst investigating neuronal activity, he found that when two or more neurons were activated simultaneously they tended to form connections. This is sometimes summarized as Hebb’s Law: ‘Neurons that fire together wire together.’

所以你可以想象，当你在世界各地穿梭，从家到火车站，从火车站到咖啡店，你的神经元都在放电和连接。你的大脑会根据外部环境做出反应，似乎可以合理地假设，放电和连接在某种程度上反映了你的经历。对吗？

So you can imagine that as you move through the world, from home to train station, from train station to coffee shop, that your neurons are firing and wiring. Your brain changes in response to your external environment, and it seems fair to assume that the firing and wiring reflect your experiences somehow. Right?

所有这些只是神经科学的基础知识，但它引出了一个核心问题：所有这些放电和连线编码是什么？你可能会猜想我们的神经元正在编码事物的外观、声音，甚至是一组含义（或“图式”）。

All this is merely neuroscience 101 – but it begs the central question: what is all the firing and wiring encoding? You might guess that our neurons are encoding the way things look – or sound – or even a set of meanings (or ‘schema’).

虽然很明显，视觉皮层确实会将我们看到的东西映射出来，^但我们所犯的错误程度和类型都强烈表明，我们记不住所见事物的视觉特征。换句话说，视觉皮层中记录的复杂视觉图像会迅速转化为一种简单得多的情绪反应模式，只需反向运行这一过程，就可以轻松存储并根据需要用来想象图像。

Whilst it is clear that the visual cortex does map the things we see as we see them,¹⁴ both the degree and type of error that we make strongly suggest that we don’t remember the visual features of what we see. In other words, the complicated visual picture that registers in your visual cortex is quickly transferred into a far simpler pattern of emotional reactions, which can be easily stored and used to conjure up a picture on demand, by running this process in reverse.

FMRI ¹⁵扫描表明确实会发生这样的事情：当你回忆视觉记忆时，视觉皮层激活的区域与你第一次体验时激活的区域相似。你还可以通过改变一个人的情绪状态来扰乱记忆；即将向大量观众发表演讲的人可能会发现他们已经完全忘记了精心排练过的演讲！

FMRI¹⁵ scans suggest that something like this does happen: when you are recalling a visual memory, similar areas of the visual cortex are activated as when you first experienced it. You can also disrupt a memory by altering a person’s emotional state; people about to address a large audience may find that they have entirely forgotten their carefully rehearsed speech!

另一方面，如果你想唤起记忆，你只需要几个词。把它们串在一起，你就有了一个故事。故事的工作原理是创造一系列声音，这些声音会引起接收者的一组特定的情绪反应，这些反应反过来会激活视觉皮层，使听众能够想象讲故事的人所描述的事件。

On the other hand, if you want to conjure up a memory all you need are a few words. String them together and you have a story. A story works by creating a series of sounds which cause a specific set of emotional reactions in the recipient, reactions which in turn activate the visual cortex, enabling a listener to picture the events the storyteller is describing.

当然，为了最大限度地发挥效果，夸大情感是有帮助的：夸张的手势、发音和表情都会有所帮助。当然还有音乐。为什么配乐对好莱坞电影如此重要？现在你知道为什么了。

Of course to maximize the effect, it helps to exaggerate the affect: dramatic gestures, pronunciation and faces will all help. And, of course, music. Why is the soundtrack so important to a Hollywood movie? Now you know why.

既然我们谈到了电影，为什么人们会去电影院看电影，即使他们有时可以选择在家看同一部电影？是不是因为其他人在场，经历着同样的事情，会加深我们的情感体验？

And while we are on the subject of movies, why do people go to the cinema to watch a movie even when they sometimes have the option to watch the same movie at home? Could it be that the presence of other people, experiencing the same thing, accentuates our emotional experience?

情感语境模型认为，被编码的内容——实际上唯一被编码的内容——是你对事件的情绪反应和信息——它们让你感觉如何。这些反应是思想和记忆的组成部分。我说的“情绪反应”不是指快乐、悲伤等，而是指你对事件的所有微妙且很大程度上无意识的情绪反应。

The affective context model says that what is being encoded – indeed the only things that are being encoded – are your emotional reactions to events and information – how these make you feel. These reactions are the things that thoughts and memories are made up of. By ‘emotional reactions’, I don’t mean happy, sad, etc, but all the subtle and largely unconscious emotional reactions you have to events.

例如，我想你会同意，你对不同的发型，或者对蓝瓶苍蝇、大黄蜂和蚊子的声音有不同的情绪反应——但你会很难用简单的“快乐/悲伤”来分类。蚊子的声音是一种非常特殊的感觉——这就是为什么你会有一组特定的词来形容它：“蚊子的声音”。

For example I imagine you would agree that you have different emotional reactions to different haircuts, or to the sound of a bluebottle, a bumblebee and a mosquito – but you would struggle to categorize these in simple ‘happy/sad’ terms. The sound of a mosquito is a very specific feeling – which is why you have a specific set of words for it: ‘the sound of a mosquito’.

再次，情感情境模型提出，当你经历事件时，事件本身不会被编码；相反，你对这些事件的反应（例如对绿色或对女人的存在的反应）会被存储起来，然后这些感觉会根据需要用来构建记忆。这种情绪痕迹可能会激活最初感知刺激的神经区域——有效地“重现”它的一个版本。

Once again, the affective context model proposes that as you experience events, the events themselves are not encoded; instead, your reactions to those events – for example to the colour green, or to the presence of a woman – are stored, and these feelings are then used to build a memory on demand. This emotional trace may then activate the same neurological regions involved in originally perceiving the stimulus – effectively ‘recreating’ a version of it.

这些版本在视觉上往往存在巨大错误，但在情感上却足够准确。这解释了记忆的语境敏感性；¹⁶我们可能无法在超市认出“可怕的”学校老师，因为他们看起来远没有那么吓人。

These versions tend to have huge mistakes visually-speaking, but are affectively sufficiently accurate. This accounts for the context-sensitivity of memory;¹⁶ we may not recognize a ‘scary’ schoolteacher at the supermarket, where they seem far less intimidating.

我认为这是对记忆功能的一个很好的解释，因为所有你期望发生在这样运作的系统上的事情实际上都发生在人类记忆中。情绪往往会随着时间的推移而消退（除非它们特别强烈），它们会与类似的感觉混淆，当你有类似的感觉时它们更容易被检索到，当你检索它们时它们会受到你现在的感觉的影响，最后但并非最不重要的是，它们是模糊和不可靠的。

I believe this is a good account of memory function because all the sorts of things that you would expect to happen to a system that works like this do in fact happen with human memory. Emotions tend to fade over time (unless they are especially strong), they get confused with similar feelings, they are easier to retrieve when you feel similarly, when you retrieve them they are affected by how you are feeling right now, and, last but not least, they are vague and unreliable.

你可能会想，为什么我们记不住电影中更多细节——而这些细节总是能激起情绪。原因之一是，我们对亲身经历的反应比电影中看到的经历更强烈，但更重要的因素是，我们的情感反应会考虑对我们重要的事情。

You might wonder why we don’t remember more details of movies – which are invariably emotive. One reason is that we have stronger responses to experiences that are happening to us personally than those we are witnessing cinematically, but a more important factor is that our affective responses take into account what matters to us.

例如，我们可能会观看一段扣人心弦的珠穆朗玛峰攀登视频，但除非我们打算亲自攀登，否则这仅仅是娱乐。这种反应不需要储存。你可以在电影中看到演员的暴力行为，这与你在早上通勤时看到火车车厢里某人的暴力行为对你的影响截然不同。我们的情绪反应具有相关性。

For example, we may watch a nail-biting account of an ascent of Everest, but unless we are planning on making the ascent ourselves it is merely entertaining. It is not a reaction that needs to be stored. You can see an actor behaving violently in a movie, and that impacts you very differently to seeing a person behaving violently in your train carriage during your morning commute. Our emotional reactions register relevance.

尽管这个想法看起来很奇怪，但神经科学领域对此的支持却越来越多。神经科学家安东尼奥·达马西奥 (Antonio Damasio) 在他的著作《事物的奇怪秩序》中评论道：“在向人类文化思维迈进的过程中，感觉的存在将使体内平衡发生巨大飞跃，因为它们可以在精神上代表生物体内的生命状态。” ¹⁷安东尼奥认为，当生物能够用感觉来表达它们所经历的事情时，它们就向前迈出了一大步。

Strange as this idea may seem, there is a growing body of support for it from the realm of neuroscience. In his book The Strange Order of Things, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio remarks: ‘In the march toward the human cultural mind, the presence of feelings would have allowed homeostasis to make a dramatic leap because they could represent mentally the state of life within the organism.’¹⁷ Antonio argues that creatures took a big step forward when they became able to represent what they are experiencing, with feelings.

我应该指出，情感情境模型有时会被误解为：“情感对学习非常重要”，或者更糟的是，“如果你想让事情令人难忘，就得让事情变得有趣”。人们之所以这么说，是因为他们仍然抱有笛卡尔的观念，认为感觉和思考是两个独立的过程。

I should point out that the affective context model is sometimes misrepresented as saying: ‘Emotions are very important to learning’, or, even worse, ‘Make stuff fun if you want it to be memorable’. People say that because they still have this Cartesian idea of feeling and thinking as separate processes.

但这完全不是情感语境模型所说的内容——它认为，当你在世界上穿梭时，只有你的情绪状态会被记录下来，而这些情绪状态足以将你的经历重建为记忆。你的情绪反应之于记忆，就如同字母之于单词：它们是记忆的组成部分，确实如此。

But this is not what the affective context model is saying at all – it states that as you move through the world, it is only your emotional states that are recorded, and that these emotional states are sufficient to reconstruct your experiences as memories. Your emotional reactions are to memory what letters are to words: they are what memories are made of, quite literally.

你不会说：“如果你在写一本书，你应该考虑使用字母表中的某些字母！”这太荒谬了——你写的就是字母。

You wouldn’t say: ‘If you are writing a book, you should consider using some letters of the alphabet!’ This would be nonsense – what you write is the letters.

理解情感情境模型有点像仔细观察世界上的每一个物体，发现它们都是由乐高积木（或原子）组成的。你的情感反应就是你经历和想法的字母。

Understanding the affective context model is a bit like looking closely at every object in the world and discovering they are all made up of Lego bricks (or atoms). Your affective reactions are the letters that your experiences, and your thoughts, are written in.

付诸实践

Putting this into practice

在实践中，这并不意味着我们需要让每件事都变得有趣或富有戏剧性；而是意味着，如果我们想让人们记住事情，我们需要花时间去了解什么对他们来说是重要的。我们不能简单地假设每个学生都会同样着迷于代数方程式——我们必须接受他们是不同的，而且对于每个人来说，只有重要的东西才会被记住。

What this means in practice is not that we need to make everything fun or dramatic; it means that if we want people to remember things we need to take the time to find out what matters to them. We can’t simply assume that every student will be equally enthralled by algebraic equations – we have to accept that they are different, and that for each individual, only what matters sticks.

当然，我们可以通过威胁（用考试）等方式让人们觉得无聊的事情重要，但这通常是一件卑鄙、原始、无效的事情。他们会记住通过考试所需的内容，然后很快忘记它（因为它不再重要）。

We can, of course, make dull stuff matter to people by doing things like threatening them (with a test) but this is generally a nasty, primitive, ineffective thing to do. They will memorize what they need to pass the test, then forget it shortly thereafter (because it no longer matters).

如果您是老师或曾经是老师，您会在工作中感受到某些紧张时刻：即当您的学生想讨论一件事但您却感到有义务继续讲课时，“否则我们就无法讲完”。这就是教学中明确的紧张——可以说，这就是教育与学习之间的区别。

If you are or have been a teacher you will recognize certain moments of tension in your work: namely, when your students want to talk about one thing but you feel duty-bound to press on with the lesson ‘otherwise we won’t get through it all’. This is the definitive tension in teaching – the difference between education and learning, one might say.

如果你真的关心你的学生，那么在这些时候你可能会感到一丝后悔，因为在某种程度上你会意识到，以牺牲学生关心的东西为代价来坚持系统关心的东西，这与学习完全相反。这是在主动阻止他们的学习。

If you care at all about your students, you will probably experience some twinge of regret at these moments because at some level you realize that pressing on with the stuff the system cares about, at the expense of what your students care about, is the very opposite of learning. It is actively shutting down their learning.

我们习惯于将情绪视为大脑中发生的事情之一，以至于我们很难将其视为大脑中唯一发生的事情。想象一下，你和朋友站在一起看别人玩一款复杂的电脑游戏。你说：“这个程序全都是 1 和 0，真是太神奇了。”你的朋友惊讶地转向你：“嗯，我猜一些基本的数学可能是 1 和 0，但我很确定其余的要复杂得多。”

We are so used to thinking of emotions as one of the things that happens in your head that we struggle to think of them as the only thing that is happening in your head. Imagine that you are standing with a friend watching someone play a sophisticated computer game. ‘It’s amazing to think,’ you remark, ‘that this program is all just 1s and 0s’. Your friend turns to you in astonishment: ‘Well, I guess some of the basic maths might be 1s and 0s but I’m pretty sure the rest is much more complicated’.

但你的朋友错了：无论计算机程序看起来多么复杂，它最终都可以简化为 1 和 0 的模式。这就是机器代码。

But your friend is wrong: however complex a computer program may seem, it can ultimately be reduced to patterns of 1s and 0s. This is machine code.

看起来“感觉”可能不够复杂，不足以产生丰富的记忆，但就像我们的计算机程序——或者我们的 DNA（或视觉）一样——极其复杂的东西可以从简单的构建块中产生。机器代码是用 1 和 0 编写的，而人类代码是用感觉编写的。毕竟，思想和感觉之间没有区别。

It might seem that ‘feelings’ might not be complex enough to give rise to the richness of memory but just like our computer program – or our DNA (or vision) – amazingly complex things can arise from simple building blocks. Machine code is written in 1s and 0s; human code is written in feelings. There is no distinction between thought and feeling after all.

^{有些人认为我们是用}语言思考的——但我们确信这不是真的；人们的思想在说话之前就形成了，没有语言的人仍然可以思考。18事实证明，我们是用感觉思考的。我们可能和大多数生物有共同之处。语言就是这些感觉的表达方式。语言只是我们给感觉起的名字。我们的感觉比大多数哺乳动物更灵活，我们的声音也是如此。

Some people imagine that we think in words – but we know for certain that this isn’t true; people’s thoughts are formed before they speak, and people with no language can still think.¹⁸ Turns out, we think in feelings. Probably we have this in common with most creatures. Words are just how those feelings sound. Words are just the names we give to feelings. Our feelings are more flexible than most mammals’, and so are our sounds.

再次强调，思想和感觉之间的关系就像一幅画和一片色块之间的关系。一幅画是由一片色块组成的。一个思想是由感觉组成的。词语就像我们给画作起的名字——比如“蒙娜丽莎”。我们说一个词，它概括并传达了构成一个思想的一种感觉模式。我现在可以做到这一点——我可以说“狗”，你对狗的感觉就会被激活，你的大脑会从它们身上产生一种模糊的心理形象。

Once again, the relationship between thoughts and feelings is like that between a painting and patches of colour. A painting is made up of patches of colour. A thought is made up of feelings. Words are like the names we give to paintings – like ‘Mona Lisa’. We speak a word, and it summarizes and communicates a pattern of feelings that comprise a thought. I can do it now – I can say ‘dog’ and your feelings about dogs are activated, and your mind generates a kind of blurry mental image from them.

如果我们思考记忆和学习，就必须接受这样一个事实：不同的人会以不同的方式记住不同的经历。没有人只是在“存储信息”。我们不是书本或电脑。我们会对事物做出反应。我们会存储这些反应。这些存储的反应会改变我们的行为。我们忽视人类记忆的这一特性会给自己带来危险；仅仅向人们展示信息可能会导致他们根本没有强烈的反应——在这种情况下，他们很可能会将其描述为“无聊”或“无关紧要”，并且不太可能记住它，更不用说采取行动了。

If we are thinking about memory and learning, we must accept that different people will remember experiences differently. No one is merely ‘storing information’. We are not books or computers. We react to things. We store those reactions. Those stored reactions change our behaviour. We disregard this feature of human memory at our peril; merely exposing people to information risks them having no strong reaction at all – in which case they will most probably describe it as ‘boring’ or ‘irrelevant’ and will be unlikely to remember it, still less to act on it.

人们很难接受大脑不存储信息这一观点——这似乎非常违反直觉。他们知道大脑会响应外部刺激而重新连接，记忆会以某种方式检索过去的事件——因此，假设大脑存储信息似乎是合乎逻辑的。但强调这一点很重要，因为这正是教育出错的地方：认为大脑就像一个盒子，我们可以将知识转移到里面。

People struggle with the idea that our minds don’t store information – it seems very counter-intuitive. They know that the brain rewires itself in response to external stimuli, and that memory somehow retrieves events from the past – so it seems logical to assume that the brain stores information. But it’s important to be emphatic about this, because this is where education goes wrong: with the idea that the mind is like a box into which we can transfer knowledge.

要了解这个想法会把我们引向何方，想象一下，一个朋友提出帮你保管一些对你很重要的东西。“我有一个特殊的储物盒，”他说。“我可以帮你保管一些重要的东西。”你给了他一把备用的房门钥匙。几个月后，你弄丢了自己的房门钥匙，于是向朋友求助。但令你惊恐的是，当你打开这个特殊的盒子时，里面是空的。你的钥匙不在那里。

To see where this idea leads us astray, imagine that a friend offers to store something of importance to you. ‘I have a special storage box’ he says. ‘I can store something important for you’. You give him a spare house key. Some months later, you lose your own house key, and you turn to your friend for help. But, to your horror, when you open the special box, it is empty. Your key isn’t there.

但是，盒子里衬着一种橡皮泥，盒子底部有钥匙的印记。你把它带给锁匠，他就能重建你的钥匙。盒子里有没有存放你的钥匙？

However, the box is lined with a kind of plasticine and, in the bottom of the box, the imprint of your key is visible. You take this to a locksmith and he is able to reconstruct your key. Did the box store your key or not?

这个类比有助于理解人类记忆的其他特征：有些东西无法很好地存放在盒子里——例如羽毛。羽毛太轻了，无法留下印象。对于你我来说，这相当于无聊的事件——它们太“轻”了，无法留下太多印象。

This analogy is helpful in understanding other features of human memory: certain things are not going to be stored very well by the box – a feather, for example. A feather is simply too light to leave an impression. For you and I, this corresponds to boring events – they are simply too ‘light’ to leave much of an impression.

这个盒子不能很好地存储画作——我的意思是，它会存储画框的轮廓，但不会存储画布上画的内容。它不是为此设计的。这就像长数字——如果一个朋友说：“这个密码非常重要”，然后继续给你 26 个数字让你记住，那么你很可能会记得他告诉你了一个重要的密码——但你不会记得它是什么。

The box won’t store paintings well – I mean it will store the outline of the frame, but not what is painted on the canvas. It isn’t designed to do that. This is like long numbers – if a friend says: ‘This password is really important’, and then proceeds to give you 26 numbers to remember, then the chances are you will remember that he told you an important password – but you won’t remember what it was.

在这个比喻中，橡皮泥代表我们对事物的情绪反应。与橡皮泥不同的是，我们的情绪反应会随着时间而变化，因此留下印象的事物对你来说是独一无二的，而且非常微妙。

In this analogy the plasticine is our emotional reactions to things. Unlike plasticine, our emotional reactions change over time, so that the sorts of things that leave an impression will be unique to you, and very subtle.

根据情感情境模型，我们刚开始对事物产生一些简单的情感反应，例如微笑和面孔，这些都会让我们自然而然地感到高兴。19^我们更喜欢漂亮的面孔。其他事物一开始可能会让我们感到害怕。但很快我们就会开始细化自己的感受。我们有一套简单的声音来反映这些感受——当孩子笑或哭时，每个人都能理解那种感觉。母亲甚至可以区分不同类型的哭声的含义。

According to the affective context model we start out in life with some simple emotional reactions to things – for example smiles and faces, which delight us automatically.¹⁹ We prefer attractive faces. Other things may scare us from the outset. But very soon we start to refine our feelings. We have a simple repertoire of sounds to reflect these feelings – when a child laughs or cries, everyone understands how it feels. Mothers can even distinguish the significance of different types of cries.

作为社会动物，我们天生就对他人的感受很敏感²⁰（不同文化的人都能轻松识别某些表情）。²¹笑声具有感染力，而当众受辱则令人痛苦。例如，我曾经去过一家喜剧俱乐部，喜剧演员讲的每个笑话都让人反感。几分钟后，他开始崩溃。我第一次真正理解了“死在舞台上”这个表达——我为他感到羞愧，我努力不站起来把他从舞台上拽下来，以免进一步受到羞辱。

As social animals we have an in-built sensitivity to other’s feelings²⁰ (and people across cultures have no difficulty recognizing some expressions).²¹ Laughter is contagious, and public shame is painful. As an example, I was once at a comedy club where every joke the comedian used fell flat. After a few minutes, he started to go to pieces. For the first time I truly understood the expression ‘to die on stage’ – I was so overwhelmed with the feeling of embarrassment for him that I struggled not to get to my feet and drag him physically from the stage to avoid further humiliation.

这种机制在更微妙的层面上塑造着我们的个性。例如，如果我们的父母每次看到黄蜂靠近就会惊慌失措，我们很快就会学会以同样的方式对嗡嗡作响的物体做出反应——黄蜂、蜜蜂甚至苍蝇。我们的情绪反应往往与他人的情绪反应相似。随着时间的推移，我们可能会逐渐完善自己的反应——例如，对蜜蜂和黄蜂的反应不同。

This same mechanism works at a more subtle level to shape our personality. If, for example, we have a parent who flies into a panic whenever a wasp approaches, we quickly learn to react in the same way to buzzing objects – wasps, bees, even flies. Our emotional responses tend to mirror those of others. Over time we may come to refine our reactions – responding differently to bees than to wasps, for example.

这大概就是为什么婴儿如此关注面孔的原因；面孔是他们观察世界的镜子。观察世界对他们来说并不重要——他们需要观察人们对世界的反应。只有这样，他们才能以应有的方式看待世界。

This is presumably why infants are so attentive to faces; faces are the mirror in which they can see the world. Seeing the world is not really what’s important to them – they need to see how people react to the world. That, and only that, will enable them to see it as they should.

再举一个例子，婴儿最初可能会被狗吓到。然而，随着时间的推移，他们不仅学会对狗做出积极的反应，还会对不同品种的狗产生不同的情绪反应。

To give another example, an infant might initially be startled by a dog. However, over time not only do they learn to react positively to dogs, they develop different emotional reactions to different breeds.

暂停一下，思考一下我之前的问题：当你听到蚊子的声音时，你的感觉和听到苍蝇的声音时的感觉一样吗？我敢肯定你不会。这两种感觉究竟有何不同？如果我说“腊肠犬”和“德国牧羊犬”这两个词，你对这些声音的反应会有所不同——你用这些感觉来想象一个形象。你能说出这些感觉究竟有何不同吗？

Pause for a second and consider my earlier question: do you feel the same when you hear the sound of a mosquito as you do when you hear the sound of a fly? I’m pretty sure you don’t. How exactly does the feeling differ? If I say the words ‘sausage dog’ and ‘German shepherd dog’, you have different feelings in reactions to those sounds – feelings that you use to conjure up an image. Could you say exactly how those feelings differ?

如果有人在雨中从你身边走过，手里拿着一把带斑点的亮粉色雨伞，你以后可能会记得它。这表明你对雨伞、亮粉色和斑点有明显的情绪反应——但我想你会很难用语言准确地表达这些东西给你带来的感受。坦率地说，你不需要——你只要说“带斑点的亮粉色雨伞”就可以表达这些感受。我们所有的语言都是有感觉的语言。

If someone passed you in the rain with a bright pink umbrella with spots, you might remember it later. This suggests that you have a distinct emotional reaction to umbrellas, to bright pink, and to spots – but I imagine you would struggle to put into words exactly how these things make you feel. And, frankly, you don’t need to – you put those feelings into words by saying ‘spotty, bright pink umbrella’. All our words are feeling words.

情感语境模型表明，我们对世界上所有对我们来说重要的事物都有微妙的情感反应。我再次肯定，你对不同的发型有不同的感受——但你能确切地说出这些感受有何不同或为什么不同吗？正如我们在上一章中看到的，我们可能认为我们缺乏词汇来描述我们对物体的感受的微妙变化——但事实上这正是我们的词汇所做的——它描述了一系列的感觉：“椅子”描述了某物可能适合坐的感觉。“莫霍克”描述了一种特别引人注目和不墨守成规的发型。

The affective context model suggests that we have subtle affective responses to all of the things that matter to us in the world. Once again, I am sure that you feel differently about different haircuts – but could you say exactly how these feelings differ or why? As we saw in the previous chapter we might think that we lack the words to describe the subtle variations we experience in our feelings towards objects – but in fact this is precisely what our vocabulary does – it describes sets of feelings: ‘chair’ describes the feeling that something might be appropriate for sitting. ‘Mohawk’ describes a particularly striking and non-conformist hairstyle.

其中一个有趣的后果是“如果你感觉不到，你就看不到”。作为一个几乎完全不了解社交暗示的人，我经常会进行这样的对话：

One of the interesting consequences of this is that ‘if you don’t feel it, you don’t see it’. As someone almost entirely oblivious to social cues, I routinely have the kind of conversation which goes something like:

“你看到她脸上的表情了吗！？”

‘Did you see the expression on her face!?’

“谁的脸？”

‘Whose face?’

“戴着疯狂帽子的女人！”

‘The woman in the crazy hat!’

“哪儿？戴帽子的女人在哪儿？”

‘Where? Where’s a woman in a hat?’

“噢，算了。”

‘Oh, forget it.’

从表面上看，似乎很难理解情绪如何导致我们精神生活的丰富和复杂：在这里，一个很好的比喻可能是人类的视网膜。人类的视网膜被配置成检测不同波长的光斑。但随着我们的成长，我们学会了将这些光斑视为物体，我们的视觉体验就会变得丰富而深刻，远远超出“光斑”的范畴。我们的情绪反应也是如此。

At face value it might seem difficult to understand how emotions give rise to the richness and sophistication of our mental life: here, again, a good metaphor might be the human retina. The human retina is configured to detect patches of light of different wavelengths. But as we develop, we learn to perceive these patches of light as objects, and our visual experience develops a richness and depth that goes way beyond ‘patches of light’. So it is with our emotional reactions.

正如我所说，我们的情绪反应受制约的方式导致的后果之一是，不同的人会“看到”不同的东西，这取决于他们强烈感受到的东西。你和朋友可能都乘坐同一辆火车——但如果你的朋友是植物专家，而你是建筑专家，你们可能会回忆起截然不同的事情。你可能会讲述一个关于各种建筑风格的有趣故事（而你的朋友只看到了“建筑物”）。另一方面，你的朋友可能会详细讲述植物类型的变化模式，而你只看到了树木和灌木丛。

As I say, one consequence of the way in which our emotional reactions are conditioned is that different people ‘see’ different things, depending on what they feel strongly about. You and a friend may both take the same train journey – but if your friend is an expert in plants and you are an expert in architecture, you may recall very different things. You may tell an entire story about the intriguing variety of architectural styles (whilst your friend only saw ‘buildings’). On the other hand, your friend may relate the shifting patterns of plant types in detail, while you only saw trees and bushes.

这一点在教育中非常重要：坐在同一个班上的两个学生可能会听到并记住截然不同的事情，这取决于他们关心什么（他们的“关注点”）。设计真正有效的教育计划的唯一方法是从了解每个人关心什么开始，因为这决定了他们会记住什么。

This point turns out to be very important in education: two students sitting in the same class may hear and remember very different things, depending on what they care about (their ‘concerns’). The only way you could design a truly effective educational programme would be to start by understanding what concerns each individual, since this determines what they will remember.

我们可以有信心地预测，那些被大量他们认为“不相关”的信息（例如，不在考试中）的学生将更容易忘记这些信息——出于这个具体原因，以学习者为中心必须放在任何教育设计过程的核心位置。

We can confidently predict that students who are subjected to a barrage of information that they perceive as ‘irrelevant’ (for example, not on the test) will be more likely to forget it – and for this very specific reason, learner-centricity must be placed at the heart of any educational design process.

您担心什么？

What are you concerned about?

现在，我们的担忧也确实由我们的生活所塑造，作为父母和教育者，我们有时会希望通过创造一套新的担忧来塑造年轻人的生活——这些担忧将在未来几年对他们的经历产生影响。但是，正如你可能立即意识到的那样，如果不激起一个人的情感，我们就无法做到这一点。如上所述，新的担忧总是建立在旧的基础上。

Now it is also true that our concerns are shaped by our lives, and as parents and educators we will sometimes want to shape the life of a young person by creating a new set of concerns – ones which will play a role in the way they encode experiences for years to come. But, as is probably immediately obvious to you, we wouldn’t accomplish this without stirring the emotions of a person. As above, new concerns are always built on the old.

如果你希望人们学习，你就必须从让他们关心开始。如果你想让他们关心，你就必须从他们今天关心的事情开始。在我们现代的教育体系中，我们通过吓唬人们来实现这一点。我们告诉他们一个可怕的故事，如果他们考试不及格，他们会遇到可怕的事情——可怕的后果，父母的失望。

If you want people to learn, you’ve got to start by getting them to care. If you want them to care, you’ve got to start with what they care about today. In our modern-day education system we accomplish this by frightening people. We tell them a story about the horrible things that will happen to them – the dire consequences, the parental disappointment – if they fail to pass a test.

但在一个开明的世界里，我们可能会把人们置于一个具有挑战性的境地——例如，他们的地位受到威胁——或者（不那么直接地）我们可能会讲述一个因为贫穷而失去生命的人的故事。决定。孩子学会以与周围人相同的方式做出反应；模仿他们的父母和同龄人。

But in an enlightened world we might place people in a challenging situation – one in which their status was at stake, for example – or (less directly) we might tell a story about someone who lost their life as a result of a poor decision. A child learns to react in the same way the people around them react; copying their parents and their peers.

我们是奇妙而复杂的生物：我们一开始像许多哺乳动物一样，关心痛苦、食物、性、地位、家庭和公平——最终我们关心塑料回收。“学习”是我们为这种关注点的塑造所起的名字。如果我们不忙着让人们记住事实，“教育”可能描述了关注点的有意塑造。

We are curiously elaborate creatures: we start out like many mammals, caring about pain, food, sex, status, family and fairness – and we end up caring about recycling plastic. ‘Learning’ is the name we give to this shaping of our concerns. ‘Education’ might describe the intentional shaping of concerns, were we not busy trying to get people to memorize facts.

值得注意的是，一个人的“顾虑”与“动机”并不相同。我和巴特利特一样注意到，语言有一种奇怪的“惯例化”效应。如果你想说一些新的东西，你就必须以新的方式使用新词或熟悉的词——比如“顾虑”。但人们很快就会把这些词翻译成更惯例的东西。

It’s important to note that a person’s ‘concerns’ are not the same as their ‘motivations’. I’ve noticed, just as Bartlett did, that language has a curious ‘conventionalizing’ effect. If you try to say something new, you have to use new words or familiar words in new ways – like ‘concern’. But people will quickly translate these into something more conventional.

因此，有些人得出这样的结论：“情感情境”只是一种花哨的说法：“动机对于学习很重要”——然后他们可以明智地点头并说：“当然——但其他事情也很重要”。

So it is that some people come to the conclusion that ‘affective context’ is just a fancy way of saying: ‘Motivation is important in learning’ – whereupon they can nod sagely and say: ‘Of course – but other things are important too’.

动机很重要，但它只是我们关心的一小部分。如果我站着跟你说话，突然流鼻血，你会记住这件事一段时间，而且很可能会讲一个故事。但说你因流鼻血而“动机”就很奇怪了。你肯定关心流鼻血。你记得星巴克的标志是绿色的，是因为你关心绿色（而不是“动机”于绿色）。

Motivations are important, but they are only a small part of our concerns. If I am standing talking to you, and I suddenly develop a nosebleed, you will remember that for a while and most likely tell a story about it. But it would be odd to say that you are ‘motivated’ by nosebleeds. You are concerned about them, for sure. The reason you remember that the Starbucks logo is green, is because you are concerned about the colour green (not ‘motivated’ by it).

想象一下，你的脑海里充满了担忧——一片充满生机的未知大陆。“动机”只是我们给一些高山起的名字。“担忧”这个词是我用来描述任何你对此有反应的事物的词。

Imagine a whole jungle of concerns in your head – an undiscovered continent teeming with life. ‘Motivations’ is just the name we give to some of the taller mountains. ‘Concern’ is a word I use to describe anything that you have a reaction to.

我试图划定的界限有点​​像“天气”和“大气”之间的界限。当人们谈论“情绪”时，他们通常指的是粗略的情绪状态——比如愤怒或惊讶。这些状态就像天气系统——台风或暖锋。我说的是大气——维持所有生命的系统，就像情感维持所有认知一样。我们可以抑制一个人的粗略情绪状态——但情感背景仍然是大脑使用的基本处理语言。

The distinction I am trying to draw is a bit like that between ‘weather’ and ‘atmosphere’. When people talk about ‘emotions’ they are usually referring to gross emotional states – like anger or surprise. These states are like weather systems – typhoons or warm fronts. I am talking about atmosphere – the system that sustains all life, just as affect sustains all cognition. We can suppress a person’s gross emotional state – but affective context is still the basic processing language that the brain uses.

在我教书的日子里，我经常花很多时间告诉学生一些信息，让他们把这些信息记在笔记本上，这样他们就可以马上忘记这些信息，然后为了通过他们害怕的考试而记住这些信息。他们经常会这样表达这种担忧：“老师，这会出现在考试中吗？”我敢肯定，他们觉得这些信息大部分都很枯燥。

In the days when I was teaching, I used to spend a lot of time telling students information that they would write down in their notebooks so that they could immediately forget it, and later memorize it for the sake of passing exams that they were scared about. Oftentimes they would voice this concern by saying ‘Sir, will this be on the test?’ Much of it seemed dull to them, I am sure.

有一次，我正在学习课程中有关异常心理学的部分。那是一个炎热的夏日，我的学生们感到无聊和心不在焉。我开始谈论躁郁症及其治疗方法。

On one occasion, I was working my way through the part of the curriculum that dealt with abnormal psychology. It was a hot summer day, and my students were bored and distracted. I started talking about bipolar disorders and treatments.

有人举起了手。其中一名比较安静的学生突然有很多问题。他们想知道不同的治疗方法和副作用。随后进行了交谈。原来，他们有一个近亲被诊断患有躁郁症，想知道更多可能有帮助的方法。

A hand went up. One of the quieter students suddenly had a lot of questions. They wanted to know about different treatments and side-effects. A conversation ensued. It turned out they had a close relative who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and wanted to know much more about what might help.

人们关心的事情决定了他们记住什么和学到什么。如果我自燃了，所有的学生都会记得这件事（人们意外着火几乎是一种天生的担忧），但要引起他们的注意似乎有点太过分了。

The things that people care about shape what they remember and what they learn. Had I spontaneously combusted, all the students would have remembered that (people catching on fire unexpectedly is pretty much an innate concern), but it seemed a bit far to go to get their attention.

现在你知道了记忆和认知是如何运作的。这种观点的转变意义重大，无论怎样强调都不为过。它颠覆了柏拉图时代的一种思维方式——在那个时代，理性和情感被认为是分离的。我想说的是，你的每一个想法都由情绪反应组成。思想就是感觉，我们的语言只是总结了一种复杂的感觉模式。当我们使用语言时，我们传达了这些感觉，我们知道它们的含义，因为我们一起成长。从本质上讲，我们的运作方式与老鼠和猫相同：并不是我们有思想而它们没有；只是我们的感情更复杂、更易改变。

So now you know how memory and cognition work. It is hard to overstate the significance of this shift in perspective. It overturns a way of thinking that dates back to Plato – a world in which reason and emotion were considered separate. What I am saying is that every thought you have is comprised of emotional reactions. Thoughts are feelings, and our words simply summarize a complex pattern of feelings. When we use words, we communicate those feelings, and we know what they mean because we grow up together. In essence, we operate in the same way that rats and cats do: it is not that we have thoughts and they don’t; it is just that our feelings are a bit more complex and malleable.

总之：我们的思想是由感觉组成的，我们的经验是由感觉组成的，我们的记忆是由感觉组成的，我们的决定是由感觉组成的（是的，甚至尤其是“理性的”商业决定和法律决定，我们将在后面讨论），我们的感知是由感觉组成的。思考就是感觉。思考就是感觉。

In sum: our thoughts are made up of feelings, our experience is made up of feelings, our memory is made up of feelings, our decisions are made up of feelings (yes even, and especially, ‘rational’ business decisions and legal ones, as we shall discuss later), our perception is made up of feelings. Thinking is feeling. Thinking is feeling.

从教育角度来看，询问人们他们认为自己应该学什么或他们认为其他人应该学什么毫无意义。他们可能会列出一系列主题和一个看似合理的理由，但结果不会是具有预期结果的课程。

From an educational standpoint, there is very little point in asking people what they think they should learn – or what they think other people should learn. They will likely come up with a list of topics and a plausible-sounding rationale, but the result will not be a curriculum that has the desired outcome.

一个更好的起点是了解他们关心什么：花时间与某人交谈（例如通过指导/辅导关系），或观察他们，或让他们讲故事，这些方法都可能揭示对某人重要的事情。这是开始帮助某人发展的唯一有效方法，方法是问：“你关心什么？”

A much better starting point is to understand what they care about: taking time to talk to someone (e.g. via a mentoring/coaching relationship), or to observe them, or to get them to tell stories are all approaches that are likely to reveal the things that matter to someone. This is the only effective way to start helping someone develop, by asking: ‘What do you care about?’

显而易见的是，这对传统的课堂教学提出了挑战：班上的学生都关心不同的事情。如果你不通过（例如）用手杖或考试来“压制”这些差异，而是将信息与他们的个人兴趣联系起来，那么你将在大多数时间里让大多数人感到无聊。

It should be immediately obvious that this presents challenges to conventional classroom delivery: the people in your class all care about different things. If you are not going to ‘steamroller’ these differences by – for example – threatening them with a cane or a test, but instead relate information to their individual interests, then you are going to be boring most of the people most of the time.

“大量”地倾倒内容是行不通的。相反，你必须找到一种个性化学习的方法，而要做到这一点，就必须找到一种找出人们关心的内容的方法。

Dumping content ‘en masse’ isn’t going to work. Instead, you would have to find a way to personalize learning, and in order to do that a way to find out what matters to people.

这对你每天的生活意味着什么？到目前为止，你可能以为当你走在街上时会发生这样的事情：你看到和听到一些事情，其中​​一些事情进入了你的记忆，这样你以后就可以回忆起来。现在你知道这不会发生。

And what does this mean for you every day? Up until this point you probably assumed that as you walked along the street something like this happens: you saw and heard things and some of those things made their way into your memory, so that you can recall them later. Now you know that this doesn’t happen.

相反，当你走在街上时，你看到的一些东西会引起情绪反应。你会储存你的反应，然后你可以用这些感觉来重现这种体验——例如通过讲故事。如果你是一个成年人，你很可能会用你多年来形成的一系列反应来填补空白。例如，如果我说“想象你在一家高档餐厅”，你会有这种感觉，桌子上铺着桌布，椅子——可能是木头的——桌子上摆满了银餐具和玻璃杯^。22

Instead: you walk down the street, some of the things you see cause an emotional reaction. You store your reactions, and you can use these feelings to recreate the experience later – for example by telling a story. If you are an adult, you will most likely fill in the blanks with sets of reactions that you have developed over the years. For example, if I say ‘Imagine you are in a fancy restaurant’ you will have this feeling that there are tables with tablecloths on them and chairs – probably made of wood – and lots of silver cutlery and glasses on the tables.²²

你间接地体验世界；通过它对你的影响。就像一只蜘蛛，坐在一张情感网的中心，世界让你精细的敏感度颤抖——这就是你所说的“体验”。你通过情感万花筒过着你的生活。

You experience the world indirectly; through the way it affects you. Like a spider, sitting at the centre of a web of emotions, the world makes your finely tuned sensitivities tremble – and it is this that you call ‘experience’. You live your life through an emotional kaleidoscope.

你决定做某件事，然后有人问你：“你为什么这么做？”你想出了一些听起来合理的解释，但实际上你做的是感觉正确的事情。我们是会找借口的生物，而不是理性的生物。你的整个人生就像一首正在演奏的音乐，而你却体验到自己正在谱写这首音乐的幻觉。

You make a decision to do something, and someone says: ‘Why did you do that?’, and you come up with some sensible sounding explanation, but in reality you did what felt right. We are rationalizing, not rational, creatures. Your entire life is like a piece of music that plays out, whilst you experience the illusion that you are writing it.

合理化动物

The rationalizing animal

情感情境模型假设的一个重要原则是，我们在很大程度上没有意识到这个过程的复杂性和精密性，这个过程发生在无意识层面。一项名为“爱荷华赌博任务”的有趣实验支持了这一观点^。23

One of the important principles assumed by the affective context model is that we are largely unaware of the complexity and sophistication of this process, which occurs at an unconscious level. Support for this comes from a curious experiment called the Iowa Gambling task.²³

想象一下你是这个实验的参与者：你面前有四副牌。你的目标是赢尽可能多的钱。每副牌都包含一些奖励或惩罚的牌。你不知道的是，有些牌包含更多的奖励牌，而有些牌包含更多的惩罚牌。问题是——你能多快找出哪些是“坏牌”？

Imagine that you are a participant in this experiment: you are presented with four decks of cards. Your goal is to win as much money as possible. Each deck contains a mix of cards that will either reward you or punish you. What you don’t know is that some decks contain more reward cards and some more punish cards. The question is – how quickly will you figure out which are the ‘bad decks’?

大多数参与者随机抽牌，大约需要 40-50 次才能找出哪些是坏牌。但有趣的是，皮肤电反应（类似于测谎仪中使用的方法）的测量结果表明，参与者在手悬停在“坏牌”上方时就已经感到紧张——仅仅经过十次尝试！换句话说，他们无意识地学会感到焦虑的速度比他们有意识地找出问题的速度要快得多。实验表明，我们的学习机制至少有一部分是在无意识、非语言层面上运作的。

Most participants pick cards at random, taking about 40–50 turns to figure out which are the bad decks. What’s interesting, though, is that measures of galvanic skin response (similar to that used in lie detectors) show that participants are already nervous when their hands hover over the ‘bad decks’ – after only ten trials! In other words, they have unconsciously learned to feel anxious far quicker than they have consciously figured out the problem. The experiment suggests that at least some of our learning mechanisms operate at an unconscious, non-verbal level.

如果您对一切事物的感受以及这些感受之间的关系很大程度上是在无意识层面处理的，那会怎样？

What if the way you feel about everything, and the relationship between those feelings, is largely handled at an unconscious level?

1998 年，心理学家安东尼·格林沃尔德 (Anthony Greenwald) 和马扎林·巴纳吉 (Mahzarin Banaji) 想出了一种方法来测试人们的内隐（无意识）记忆，以及人们没有意识到的记忆之间的关联。24^他们创造了一种类似于电脑游戏的东西，你必须将单词分类到列中。一个单词会出现在屏幕中间，你必须尽快将它拖到左侧的列（例如标题为“女性 - 强大”）或右侧的列（例如标题为“男性 - 弱”），具体取决于你认为这个词最适合放在哪里。

In 1998 psychologists Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji came up with a way to test people’s implicit (unconscious) memories, and the associations between memories that people weren’t aware of.²⁴ They created something like a computer game in which you had to sort words into columns. A word would appear in the middle of your screen and – as quickly as possible – you would have to drag it to the column on the left (for example titled ‘Women-Strong’) or the column on the right (for example titled ‘Men-Weak’), depending on where you felt the word best belonged.

他们发现，当列的标题符合我们的偏见（例如“男性强”、“女性弱”）时，人们排序的速度会快得多。同样的方法也用于检查各种隐性偏见和刻板印象；例如，它表明，在一个平均样本中，大约 70% 的成年人更喜欢白人而不是黑人^。25

What they found is that when the columns were titled in line with our biases (for example ‘Men-Strong’, ‘Women-Weak’) people sorted the items much quicker. The same method was used to check for all manner of implicit biases and stereotypes; for example, it showed that in an average sample around 70 per cent of adults have a preference for white people over black people.²⁵

在绝大多数情况下，表现出隐性偏见的人并没有意识到这些偏见。

In the vast majority of cases, people who were shown to have implicit biases were not consciously aware of those biases.

内隐联想测试表明了两点：首先，我们对事物的感受方式很可能是在无意识中形成的。其次，我们对事物的感受方式之间存在着我们尚未意识到的关系。

The implicit association test suggests two things: first, the way that we feel about things may well be processed unconsciously. Second, there are relationships between the way we feel about things, of which we are not aware.

但如果你不愿意接受一个全新的思维模式，我可以理解。人们习惯了一种思维方式，并本能地对他们所习惯的惯例产生防御心理。已经长大了。人们倾向于“对不认识的东西咆哮”——它们只是发出更复杂的声音。

But I can understand if you feel a reluctance to accept a completely new model of how your mind works. People grow accustomed to a way of thinking, and have an instinctive defensiveness around the conventions that they have grown up with. People have a tendency to ‘bark at things they don’t recognize’ – they just make more complicated sounds.

达尔文的进化论刚提出时，就被批评为“只是一种假设”。这是真的——它缺乏任何证据支持。人们对它大发雷霆或大笑；这似乎很荒谬——查理真的在暗示我的高祖母是一只猴子吗？太荒谬了！看看这幅把他画成长臂猿的漫画！哈哈哈！

When it was first introduced, Darwin’s Theory of Evolution was criticized as being ‘just a hypothesis’. It was true – it lacked any evidential support whatsoever. People raged at it or laughed at it; it seemed ridiculous – was Charlie really suggesting that my great-great-great-grandmother was a monkey? How preposterous! Look at this cartoon of him as a gibbon! Ha ha ha!

但是达尔文理论的优势在于其解释力：进化论可以解释许多奇特的事物——例如化石——而流行的理论却无法解释（尽管有人尝试过：“上帝把它们放在那里是为了考验我们的信仰”等等）。

But what Darwin’s theory had in its favour was explanatory power: there were many peculiar things that evolution could explain – fossils for example – that the prevailing theory could not (although attempts were made: ‘God put them there to test our faith’, etc).

是什么使得情感情境模型成为最好的理论？

What makes the affective context model the best theory?

好的理论具有解释力——那么情感情境模型可以解释什么呢？答案是很多——这里仅列举其中的一小部分。

A good theory has explanatory power – so what things can the affective context model explain? It turns out a great many – here are just a few.

这解释了为什么伊丽莎白·洛夫特斯在记忆中发现了错误：人们不会储存“情节”，相反，对事件的记忆只是对你感觉的记忆。当你重新激活你储存的感觉时，你当前的感觉就会发挥作用。你对“粉碎”等词的感觉与对“接触”等词的感觉截然不同，会让你产生不同的重构。

It explains why Elizabeth Loftus found the inaccuracies that she did in memory: people don’t store ‘episodes’, instead a memory of an event is simply a memory of how you felt. As you reactivate your stored feelings, your current feelings will play a part. The feelings you have about a word like ‘smash’ are quite different to your feelings about a word like ‘contacted’, and will cause you to conjure up a different reconstruction.

这解释了为什么音乐和故事对所有文化、所有时代的人类都如此重要：从本质上讲，它们是同一件事；一组通过声音分享的情感反应。如果没有将声音与情感联系起来的能力，我们很可能就无法创造出语言。

It explains why music and stories are so important to humans across all cultures, at all times: in essence they are the same thing; a set of affective responses that are shared using sound. It is likely that without an ability to associate sounds with emotions, we could not have produced language.

这解释了为什么当你回顾自己的生活时，你更有可能回忆起那些情感上重要的经历。26^这些不一定是改变生活的事件（搬家、搬家、结婚、生孩子、被诊断出癌症）；它们也可以是一些简单的事情，比如一句谴责或鼓舞人心的评论。这也解释了这一发现：如果我们能让信息与学习者更个人相关，他们就更有可能记住它。

It explains why, when you look back on your life, it will be the emotionally significant experiences that you are more likely to recall.²⁶ These don’t need to be life-changing events (moving country, moving house, getting married, the birth of a child, a cancer diagnosis); they can also be something as simple as a single damning or inspiring comment. This also accounts for the finding that if we can make information more personally relevant to learners, they are more likely to remember it.

这解释了为什么当我们将经历描述为“无聊”时，我们往往记不住其中的一小部分。正如艾宾浩斯发现的那样，没有情感意义的信息几乎会立即消失。相比之下，如果我们呈现如果人们有一张列表，其中既有枯燥的单词，也有令人兴奋的单词，那么他们更有可能记住令人兴奋的单词。

It explains why, when we describe experiences as ‘boring’, we tend to remember very little of them. As Ebbinghaus discovered, information without affective significance is almost immediately lost. By contrast, if we present people with a list of dull words and exciting ones, they are more likely to remember the exciting ones.

这解释了为什么两个人可能有相同的经历，但回忆却截然不同。心理学家早就知道记忆是一个主动的过程，而不是被动的过程，但一直缺乏一个解释框架来描述记忆的主动方式。

It explains why two people may have the same experience, but recall very different things. Psychologists have long known that memory is an active process, not a passive one, but have lacked an explanatory framework for describing the ways in which memory is active.

这也解释了为什么记忆是情境敏感的。27^计算机记忆不是情境敏感的：你可以把笔记本电脑带回原来的学校，它还是一样工作——而你的记忆却如潮水般涌来。这也暗示了为什么学生在他们学习的同一个房间里参加考试时表现最好，或者为什么抑郁的人往往会记住消极事件而不是积极事件。

It also explains why memory is context-sensitive.²⁷ Computer memory isn’t context sensitive: you can take your laptop back to your old school and it works just the same – whilst for you the memories come flooding back. This also hints at why students perform best when taking a test in the same room in which they learned, or why people who are depressed tend to remember negative events and not positive ones.

你的情绪状态会严重影响你的记忆能力——你甚至会惊慌失措，记不起最简单的事情该怎么做。你可以登上舞台发表排练过一百遍的演讲，但演讲内容却从你的脑海中消失了。

Your general emotional state can seriously affect your ability to remember things – you can even be so panicked that you can’t recall how to do the simplest things. You can get up on stage to give a speech you’ve rehearsed a hundred times, only to have the whole thing vanish from your mind.

回忆起我们的学生时代，我们也能开始明白为什么我们会记得那些热情的老师（或可怕的老师）和关心我们的人。当老师努力将信息与我们关心的事情联系起来时——与我们相关的事情——这已被证明能提高记忆力。

Recalling our school days, we can also begin to see why we remember enthusiastic teachers (or terrifying ones) and the people who cared about us. When a teacher makes an effort to relate information to something that matters to us – something that is relevant – this has been shown to improve recall.

其他可以提高对枯燥信息回忆能力​​的助记技巧包括想象怪异或情绪化的场景——越奇怪越好。在设计学习时，我们应该记住，如果学习发生在与回忆可能发生的情绪状态截然不同的情绪状态下（例如紧急情况），那么个人可能无法在激动时刻回忆起很多事情。

Other mnemonic techniques that can improve recall for boring information involve imagining bizarre or emotive scenes – the stranger the better. When designing learning, we should bear in mind that if learning takes place in an emotional state very different to that in which recall may occur (e.g. emergency situations), then the individual may be unable to recall much in the heat of the moment.

它解释了为什么当我们回忆信息时，我们所犯的错误往往是“情感替代”——即我们用“感觉”相同的元素来重现体验。我们可能会记住老虎而不是豹子——我们可能会想象我们最害怕的学校老师就像罗尔德·达尔的《玛蒂尔达》故事中的特朗奇布尔小姐。

It explains why, when we recall information, the mistakes we make tend to be ‘affective substitution’ – i.e. we recreate experiences with elements that ‘feel’ the same. We may remember tigers instead of leopards – and we might imagine that our most feared schoolteacher resembled Miss Trunchbull from the Roald Dahl Matilda story.

作为这种效果的延伸，隐喻和创造力涉及情感替代。当华兹华斯写下“我像一朵云一样孤独地徘徊”时，这句话之所以有意义，只是因为我们可以将我们孤独的感觉与我们对天空中一朵孤独的云的反应进行比较。重要的是要注意，这两件事不是根据它们的含义（语义替代）进行比较，而是基于它们的感觉进行比较。

In an extension of this effect, metaphor and creativity involve affective substitution. When Wordsworth writes ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, it makes sense only because we can compare our feeling of being isolated with how we react to a cloud alone in the sky. It is important to note that these two things are not being compared on the basis of what they mean (semantic substitution), but on the basis of how they feel.

简而言之，这就是创造力的本质——能够根据事物带给我们的感受来比较它们。它使我们能够写诗、讲述笑话、将我们的心情与音乐相匹配——这就是计算机永远无法做到这些事情的原因。当然，它们可以模仿我们——甚至欺骗我们——但你和你的影子之间总是有区别的。

This, in a nutshell, is the essence of creativity – being able to compare things in terms of how they make us feel. It enables us to write poetry, tell jokes, match our mood to a piece of music – and it’s the reason why computers will never be able to do these things. Sure, they can copy us – even fool us – but there will always be a difference between you and your shadow.

游戏化以及人们作弊的原因

Gamification and why people cheat

最后，情感情境模型解释了行为主义的核心之谜。行为主义是 20 世纪 70 年代兴起的一种心理学思想流派。该流派的支持者发现，行为可以通过“经典”条件反射和“操作性”条件反射进行改变。

Finally, the affective context model explains a mystery at the heart of behaviourism. Behaviourism is a psychological school of thought originating in the 1970s. Its proponents discovered that behaviour could be modified through ‘classical’ and ‘operant’ conditioning.

例如，如果老鼠或鸽子在按下杠杆时得到正面奖励（如食物颗粒），它们会更用力地按下杠杆。同样，如果给它们惩罚（如电击），它们就会停止。这一惊人发现为行为改变打开了无限可能。

For example, if rats or pigeons were presented with positive reinforcement (such as a food pellet) when they pressed a lever, they would press the lever more. Equally, if they were presented with a punishment (such as an electric shock), they would stop. This amazing discovery opened the door to a universe of possibilities for behaviour modification.

如今，我们倾向于使用“游戏化”一词来描述这种技术。如今，你可能已经体验到了游戏化——你可能因购物而获得奖励积分，或者使用了会员卡。如果你的孩子在学校上学，他们可能会因表现良好而获得金星。但行为主义者没有回答最重要的问题：究竟什么是积极强化？那么，什么是惩罚？

Today, we tend to use the word gamification to describe this technique. You have probably been gamified today – you may have received reward points for your purchases, or used a loyalty card. If you have children at school, they may well receive gold stars for good behaviour. But the behaviourists left the most important questions unanswered: what, exactly, is a positive reinforcement? And, for that matter, what is a punishment?

答案是：积极的强化会让我们感觉良好。毕竟，老鼠不会学习按压木球的杠杆。而惩罚会让我们感觉糟糕。当然，讽刺的是，行为主义需要一个情感状态模型才能有意义——即避免“积极强化”和“消极强化”的定义循环。

The answer is: a positive reinforcement is something we feel good about. Rats don’t learn to press levers for wooden pellets, after all. And a punishment is something we feel bad about. The irony, of course, is that behaviourism needs a model of affective states to make any sense at all – i.e. to avoid definitions of ‘positive reinforcer’ and ‘negative reinforcer’ being circular.

行为主义本质上是一套应用情感意义来改变行为的技术：如果我们知道一种生物喜欢食物并且讨厌痛苦，我们如何利用这一点来改变它们的行为？像我们一样学习的生物，感觉也像我们。

Behaviourism is, essentially, a set of techniques for applying affective significance to bring about behaviour change: if we know a creature likes food and hates pain, how do we use that to bring about a change in their behaviour? Creatures that learn like us, feel like us.

情感情境模型试图纠正自文明开始以来就困扰我们的一个错误。这是一个新理论，因此在实验支持方面还有一段路要走。但一个好的理论不仅仅是经过检验的理论——一个好的理论是能够解释和预测的理论。

The affective context model is an attempt to correct a mistake that has dogged us since the beginning of civilization. It’s a new theory, so it has some way to go in terms of experimental support. But a good theory is not merely one that has been put to the test – a good theory is one that explains and predicts.

那么——总结一下——为什么它比我们今天的理论更好？

So – to conclude – why is it a better theory than the ones we have today?

首先，它为各种心理现象提供了统一的解释框架，从操作性条件反射到目击证词的不可靠性。我们对认知的观察——无论是观察海蛞蝓还是人类——现在都由一个理论而不是多个原始理论来解释。它对日常学习和记忆的解释与对实验条件下的发现一样可靠，并为我们批评和改进教育提供了基础。

Firstly, it provides a unified explanatory framework for a wide variety of psychological phenomena, ranging from operant conditioning to the unreliability of eye-witness testimony. Our observations about cognition – whether we are looking at a sea-slug or a human being – are now accounted for by a single theory, rather than a multitude of proto-theories. It explains everyday learning and memory just as dependably as it does findings under experimental conditions, and provides a foundation for us to critique and improve education.

其次，它可以解释许多迄今为止无法解释的怪现象，例如我们在人工智能、哲学以及人类对偏见、讲故事和音乐的奇怪倾向方面遇到的障碍。

Secondly, it can account for many hitherto unexplained peculiarities, such as the roadblocks we have hit with regard to artificial intelligence, philosophy, and the curious human propensity for bias, storytelling and music.

第三，测试起来很容易。例如，你可以混合列出四个字母的单词，其中一些单词具有强烈的情感背景（如“stab”），而另一些单词则具有较弱的情感背景（如“pave”），然后看看人们最有可能记住哪些单词。

Thirdly, it’s easy to test. For example, you could mix up a list of four-letter words, some of which have strong affective context (like ‘stab’) and others weak (like ‘pave’), and see which people are most likely to remember.

最后，这很有道理：与普遍的看法相反，人类记忆不会存储你所经历的一切。事实上，人类被称为“认知吝啬鬼”——在绝对必要的情况下，他们只会付出很少的认知努力。我们只记得我们所经历的片段，重建事件，而且重建的方式完全不可靠。

Finally, it makes good sense: contrary to popular belief, human memory does not store everything that you experience. In fact humans are known to be ‘cognitive misers’ – expending as little cognitive effort as in absolutely necessary. We remember only fragments of what we experience, reconstruct events, and in a fashion which is thoroughly unreliable.

情感情境模型提出了一个高效（可以根据我们对事件的反应重建整个事件）且具有选择性的系统：我们应该记住什么？当然是重要的东西。

The affective context model proposes a system which is highly efficient (entire events can be reconstructed from our reactions to them) and selective: what should we remember? The stuff that matters, of course.

我想用学习和记忆的新定义来结束本章：

I’d like to end this chapter with new definitions of learning and memory:

学习：由于记忆而导致的行为或能力的改变。

Learning: a change in behaviour or capability as a result of memory.

记忆：对经历的情感反应的编码，可以重建该经历。

Memory: the encoding of an affective response to an experience, which allows that experience to be reconstructed.

在进一步讨论之前，我们必须解决的一个问题是“教育”和“学习”这两个术语之间的区别。它们是完全不同的东西——以至于教育几乎与学习相反。但人们已经习惯于将它们当作相同的意思来使用，这埋没了学习。

One of the problems we have to solve before we go any further is the difference between the terms ‘education’ and ‘learning’. They are radically different things – so much so that education is almost the opposite of learning. But people have fallen into using them as if they mean the same, and this has buried learning.

现在我们对学习有了一定的了解，我们可以看到教育已经偏离学习有多远，以及我们需要做些什么来重振学习并将其重新引入教育。

Now that we have an understanding of learning, we can see how far education has drifted from it, and what we might have to do to resurrect learning and re-introduce it to education.

“人们不会关心你知道多少，除非他们知道你关心多少。”

‘People won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.’

匿名

ANON

2045 年，令所有人都大吃一惊的是，人们在火星地表下发现了一个完整的文明。更令人惊讶的是，这些外星人与我们有着惊人的相似之处（这引发了人们对他们共同祖先的猜测）。

In the year 2045 – much to everyone’s surprise – an entire civilization is discovered living beneath the surface of Mars. Even more surprisingly, the aliens bear a striking resemblance to us (prompting speculation about a common ancestor).

初次接触后，代表团会集合起来，以便更好地了解我们各自的文化，作为学习专家，你被邀请一起去。你惊讶地发现他们也有一套教育体系——和我们的非常相似。“年轻人”安静地排成一排，由一名教员监督。他们在这个体系中待 10 年，最后参加期末考试，然后申请工作。

After first contact is made, delegations are assembled for the purposes of establishing a better understanding of our respective cultures and – as a learning expert – you are asked to go along. You are astonished to find that they too have an education system – one remarkably like ours. ‘Younglings’ sit quietly in rows while an instructor supervises them. They remain in this system for a period of 10 years, culminating in a final examination, before applying for employment.

只是课程设置不同，小学生们要花 10 年时间记住圆周率 (3.141592……) 的小数点后几位。

Only the curriculum is different. The younglings spend 10 years memorizing Pi (3.141592…) to as many decimal places as possible.

期末考试测试他们对圆周率的记忆——一般学生可以记住圆周率大约 10,000 位，并根据他们能记住的小数位数给出分数（从 A 到 F）。这些分数和打印分数的纸非常重要。火星雇主在决定是否雇用某人时会使用这些分数。

The final examination tests their memory of Pi – the average student can recall Pi to around 10,000 places, and grades (from A to F) are awarded depending on how many decimal places they can recall. Great importance is attached to these grades and the piece of paper on which they are printed. Martian employers use these grades when deciding whether or not to employ someone.

你礼貌地向主人询问圆周率在他们的文化中是否扮演着重要角色——他们回答说不是，事实上大多数学生在考试后不久就忘记了他们学到的东西，普通成年人只能记得大约 100 位。几乎没有任何工作需要一个人记住圆周率的数字（毕竟他们很容易查到），除了“圆周率讲师”的角色。事实证明，Pi 讲师有很多，因为教育系统需要他们。

You politely enquire of your host whether Pi plays a central role in their culture – to which they respond that it does not, and that in fact most students forget what they have learned shortly after the exam, with the average adult only recalling it to around 100 places. There are hardly any jobs that actually require a person to know the number Pi by heart (which after all they could easily look up), with the exception of the role of ‘Pi instructor’. It turns out there are many Pi instructors, as they are needed by the education system.

你调查得越多，你就越会发现这个系统非常奇怪。

The more you investigate, the more things strike you as very odd about this system.

首先，一个人背诵圆周率的能力似乎不太可能成为选择工作的好标准。其次，如果人们忘记了大部分学习内容，那么一开始就不清楚为什么值得教他们。最后，观察课堂上的年轻人，很明显许多人在背诵圆周率方面确实很吃力——而且很难不得出这样的结论：正在发生的事情实际上是一种折磨，目的是让年轻人变得迟钝和顺从（而这正是该系统的真正目的）。

First, it doesn’t seem likely that a person’s ability to memorize Pi would be a very good way to choose them for a job. Second, if people forget most of their learning, it’s not clear why it is worth teaching them in the first place. Finally, watching the younglings in the classroom it is clear that many really struggle with the tasks of memorizing Pi – and it is hard to escape the conclusion that what is going on is really some kind of torture designed to make the younglings dull and compliant (and that this is the true purpose of the system).

当你和这些孩子交谈时，你会发现他们中的一些人确实很喜欢背诵圆周率，有些人喜欢老师，但大多数人对恐龙、舞蹈和 Mootball（一种类似于足球的火星游戏）等东西更感兴趣。他们对学校最常见的反应是“无聊”。

When you speak to the younglings, you find that a few of them do quite like memorizing Pi, some of them like the teacher, but the majority are much more interested in things like dinosaurs, dance and Mootball (a Martian game similar to football). The most common response to how they feel about school is that it is ‘boring’.

你还发现，在外星文化中，有大量科学证据证明让幼童记住圆周率的最有效方法；整本期刊都以《学习的科学》为题发表了关于这一主题的文章。你觉得这实际上并不是关于学习本身的证据——因为记忆数字并不是学习过程进化而来的事情——无论是在我们人类还是他们的物种中。存储信息是书本或计算机可以完美完成的事情，但生物却做得很差。你想知道“教育”研究是否真的与学习有关。

Something else you discover is that in the alien culture there is lots of scientific evidence about the most effective ways to get younglings to memorize Pi; entire journals are published on the subject under the title The Science of Learning. It doesn’t seem to you that this is really evidence about learning per se – since memorizing numbers isn’t the kind of thing that learning processes evolved to do – in either our species or theirs. Storing information is the kind of thing that a book or a computer does perfectly, but a creature very badly. You wonder if the ‘educational’ research really has anything to do with learning at all.

在访问结束时，你错误地向外星主人提到了你的疑虑。他们有些恼火，问道：“那么，你们如何教育你的孩子？”你用和解的语气解释说，人类的教育方法大致相同，但课程范围更广——代数、化学、历史等。只有当你的主人问你的学生会用到多少这些知识时，你才意识到自己的错误。你意识到我们做的事情完全一样。

At the end of your visit you make the mistake of mentioning your misgivings to your alien host. Somewhat miffed, they enquire: ‘Well, how do you educate your younglings?’ In a conciliatory tone you explain that the human educational approach is much the same, but that the curriculum is broader – algebra, chemistry, history, etc. It is only when your host asks how much of this your students go on to use that you realize your error. You realize that we do exactly the same thing.

如今，很多人觉得教育系统出了问题——从亿万富翁企业家到二十多岁的说唱歌手，每个人都可以滔滔不绝地谈论教育系统有多么糟糕。但没有人清楚该如何解决它。

These days there is no shortage of people who feel that there is something wrong with the education system – everyone from billionaire entrepreneurs to 20-something rappers can hold forth on how broken it is. But no one has a clear idea of how to fix it.

最糟糕的是，那些认为这个系统已经崩溃的人，往往坚持这种关于心智的“知识保留”假设：他们直觉地认为大脑有点像一台电脑、一本书或一块石板，你可以在上面存储事实。所以当你逼迫这些人，让他们描述教育系统应该如何运作时，他们最终会回到类似于传统的“知识转移”模型，因为他们无法想象，如果不让人们在头脑中存储信息，学习还能是什么。

Worst of all, the people who think the system is broken often cling to this ‘knowledge retention’ assumption about the mind: they intuitively feel that the mind is a bit like a computer or a book or a slate on which you can store facts. So when you press these people and ask them to describe the way an educational system should work, they eventually fall back on something resembling the conventional ‘knowledge transfer’ model, since they are unable to imagine what else learning could be if it is not getting people to store information in their heads.

我说的并不只是那些平凡的名人；我的意思是，我们所能提供的最好的教育理论家仍然认为学习就像是记忆事实。

I’m not just talking about your run-of-the-mill celebrities; I mean the very best educational theorists we have to offer still think learning is something like memorizing facts.

直观地看，让人们学习他们想学的东西似乎很有吸引力——有些人确实尝试过“探索性学习”——但总的来说，教育系统得出的结论是，这种方法并不比让人们坐成一排，把东西写下来更好。

Intuitively, letting people learn what they want to learn seems appealing – and some people have indeed experimented with ‘exploratory learning’ – but overall the education system has concluded that this approach is no better than having people sit in rows, writing stuff down.

你可能想知道他们是如何得出这个结论的——答案是他们让两组人都参加传统的考试，考试内容是回忆已经记住的事实。值得停下来思考一下这是多么荒谬的事情：在我们的外星人例子中，这就像说：“当我们允许人们自由学习时，我们发现他们没有记住圆周率的很多位置——所以我们得出结论，自由学习是无效的！”

You might wonder how they arrived at this conclusion – to which the answer is they had both groups sit traditional exams, which consist of recalling facts you have memorized. It’s worth pausing to reflect on what a ridiculous thing that is to do: in our aliens example, it would be like saying: ‘When we allowed people to learn freely, we discovered they didn’t memorize Pi to as many places – so we concluded learning freely is not effective!’

你可能会在这里向我提出质疑：“那么我们应该如何评估学习？”对此，我会回答说，由于我们无法直接观察神经变化（大部分情况下），我们应该像评估其他生物一样评估它，观察它们能做什么。然后我们可能会就人们应该能够做的事情展开热烈的讨论——但几乎可以肯定的是，这些都不会是将信息复述到试卷上。

You might challenge me here: ‘So how should we assess learning?’ To which I would respond that since we can’t observe neural changes directly (for the most part), we should assess it the same way we do with other creatures, by looking at what they can do. We might then have a lively discussion about the sorts of things people should be able to do – but almost certainly none of these would be regurgitating information onto exam papers.

从本质上讲，问题在于人们接受了笛卡尔的思想，认为我们应该能够像计算机一样学习，因此认为学习就是将知识存储在我们的大脑中。这种隐藏的假设出现在流行的科幻电影中，比如《黑客帝国》，有人将一根电缆插入你的后脑勺，你立刻就会“掌握功夫”——或者有人的大脑被一种化学物质增强了，你只需要翻阅字典就可以“学习一门语言”。

In essence, the problem is that people have accepted Cartesian thinking, in which we should be able to learn like computers, and therefore think that learning is all about storing knowledge in our heads. This hidden assumption surfaces in popular sci-fi movies, like The Matrix, where someone plugs a cable into the back of your head and instantly you ‘know Kung Fu’ – or where someone’s brain has been boosted by a chemical and you need merely flip the pages of a dictionary to ‘learn a language’.

毕竟，这就是计算机的工作原理——你下载程序后，它们就能立即执行新操作。这种像计算机一样的哲学愿望根深蒂固。很抱歉让你失望了，但这永远不会发生。

This is how computers work, after all – you download the program, and instantly they can do something new. This philosophical aspiration, to be like a computer, runs deep. I am sorry to disappoint you, but this is never going to happen.

为什么？好吧，请将这与我在上一章中给出的学习描述进行比较，神经线路的每一次变化都是对周围事件的情绪反应的结果。这就是孩子们学习一门语言。因此，一部准确的科幻电影需要让你通过重温一个孩子（比如说 12 岁之前）在外国长大的整个生活来学习一门语言。

Why? Well, compare this with the description of learning I gave in the previous chapter, where every change in your neural wiring comes as the result of an emotional reaction to events around you. This is how children learn a language. An accurate sci-fi movie would therefore need to have you learn a language by reliving the entire life of a child (say up to the age of 12) growing up in a foreign country.

那究竟是怎么回事？比较一下这个疯狂的想法：如果你想看一部电影，但只有一分钟时间，你可以以 100 倍的速度观看。这根本行不通！大脑不是那样工作的。我们可能这样工作的想法来自我们知道有某种内部时钟的计算机，有时我们可以跑得更快，在更短的时间内获得相同的结果。

How would that work exactly? Compare the nutty idea that if you wanted to watch a movie and only had one minute, you could run it at 100x speed to watch it anyway. It doesn’t work! The brain doesn’t work like that. The idea that we might work like that comes from computers which we know have some kind of internal clock, that sometimes we can just run faster to get the same result in a shorter time.

现在，有这样的想法并没有什么错：有一天，你可能会拥有一个可以放在耳朵里为你进行语言翻译的设备（就像《银河系漫游指南》里的巴别鱼），但你并没有学会一门新语言——事实上，恰恰相反：这个设备几乎消除了你学习这门语言的任何机会。它消除了学习的需要。

Now, there’s nothing wrong with the idea that one day you might have a device that you stick in your ear that does the language translation for you (like the Babel fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), but you haven’t learned a new language – in fact, the opposite: the device has pretty much eliminated any chance that you will learn the language. It has eliminated the need to learn.

如果这个场景听起来非常熟悉，那是因为这正是技术为我们所做的：它消除了学习的需要，将知识和能力外化。你甚至可以在大脑中安装一个芯片，其中包含维基百科的所有内容，并能够使用你的脑电波导航到你感兴趣的主题。但你仍然需要阅读它。它只会比我们今天在屏幕上阅读的速度稍微快一点。

If that scenario sounds strikingly familiar, that is because that is precisely what technology does for us: it eliminates the need to learn, it externalizes knowledge and capability. You could even have a chip installed in your brain that contains all the content in Wikipedia, and the ability to use your brainwaves to navigate to the topic you are interested in. But you will still need to read it. It will be only marginally quicker than what we do today, on our screens.

让我明确一点：如果你不去生活，你就学不会。坐在教室里学习第二语言也是如此：语言学习系统为我们呈现了情感背景的“回声”，我们在真正学习时会体验到这种情感背景。“你在面包店，你想点一些羊角面包”，等等。没有捷径可走，就像你睡觉时枕头下放着一本法语词典，醒来后就能说一口流利的法语一样。

Let me be clear: if you don’t live it, you don’t learn it. This is also true of learning a second language sitting in a classroom: language learning systems present us with ‘echoes’ of the emotional context that we would experience if learning it for real. ‘You are in a boulangerie, you wish to order some croissants,’ etc. There is no shortcut, any more than you can sleep with a French dictionary under your pillow and wake up a fluent French speaker.

因为人们被困在笛卡尔知识传递模式中，所以教育革命不可能发生——无论有多少人对现有体系不满意。在我们理解学习之前，我们将使用错误的标准来衡量成功。人们将继续抱怨现有体系，而无法提出合理的替代方案——事实上，糟糕的替代方案将继续像毒蘑菇一样涌现。

Because people are stuck with the Cartesian knowledge transfer model, it is impossible for an educational revolution to take place – however many people are dissatisfied with the current system. Until we understand learning, we will be using the wrong yardstick for measuring success. People will continue to moan about the current system, without being able to offer up a sensible alternative – in fact, bad alternatives will continue to spring up like toxic toadstools.

这种不稳定的混合体——对教育的普遍不满，加上对替代方案几乎完全缺乏远见——创造了一个空间，各种糟糕的想法都吸引了投资：虚拟教室、大规模开放在线课程（MOOC）、电子学习、微学习......

This volatile mixture – widespread dissatisfaction with education, coupled with a near-complete lack of vision regarding alternatives – has created a space in which all manner of terrible ideas attract investment: virtual classrooms, massive open online course (MOOCs), e-learning, micro-learning…

这些所谓的新方法都存在着相同的根本缺陷——它们声称是一种将知识灌输到人们头脑中的更有效的方法，但却没有一种能体会到推动学习的个人关注点。每次部署时，它们都会被当作超高效的知识传输系统来卖给投资者和消费者，而每次人们都会购买这种无稽之谈，而且每次它们都会失败。

Each of these supposedly new approaches shares the same fundamental flaw – they promise to be a more efficient method for dumping content into people’s heads, but none is sensitive to the individual concerns that drive learning. Each time they are deployed, they are sold to investors and consumers as hyper-efficient knowledge transfer systems, and each time people buy this nonsense, and every time they fail.

然而，市场却蓬勃发展：投资者抓住了人们对维多利亚模式的普遍不满，并（感觉到可以大赚一笔）将资金投入到任何看起来有希望的东西上。

And yet, the market flourishes: investors grasp that widespread dissatisfaction with the Victorian model and (sensing a killing to be made) throw money at anything that looks promising.

教育怎么会陷入如此混乱？

How did education get in such a muddle?

关于当今教育，首先要知道的是，我们教授的内容或以我们的方式教授内容没有任何充分的理由。你有没有想过，为什么你在学校学习地理、历史、数学、科学、英语等？没有？那也行——因为没有一个合理的解释。

The first thing to know about education today is that there are no good reasons why we teach the things that we teach, or teach them in the way that we do. Did you ever stop to wonder why you learned geography, history, maths, science, English and things like that at school? No? That’s just as well – as there isn’t a decent explanation.

但在深入讨论之前，让我们先从所有美好故事的开始说起：从头开始。

But before we get into that, let’s start where all good stories begin: at the beginning.

在人类历史的绝大部分时间里，我们的教育方法基本保持不变：幼儿（和其他动物）通过游戏来学习，在游戏中他们会试验新发现的能力，通过对所做之事的反应来学习，通过观察——通过观察别人身上发生的事情来学习。

For the vast majority of human history, our approach to education remained largely unchanged: young children (and other animals) would learn through play in which they experiment with their new-found capabilities, through their reactions to the things they do, and through observation – in which they learn by watching what happens to others.

由于人类是社会性动物，因此能够感受到他人情绪的回响（通过镜像神经元系统，通过面部表情和动作解读他们的反应），我们可以感受到他人的痛苦或快乐，就像感受自己的痛苦或快乐一样（尽管有所减弱）。这也让你我能够欣赏英雄——我们当然认同他——战胜逆境的电影。因此，我们也通过故事学习，故事中的重要教训通过口头传统传承下来。有价值的信息，例如我们不太可能经常遇到的危及生命的情况，都是以故事的形式传递的。

Since humans are social creatures and therefore designed to experience echoes of other’s emotions (through a system of mirror neurons, and by interpreting their reactions through their faces and movements) we can feel another’s pain or pleasure as if it were our own (albeit attenuated). This also allows you and I to enjoy movies where the hero – with whom we identify, obviously – triumphs over adversity. Hence, we also learn through stories, in which important lessons are handed down via an oral tradition. Valuable information, for example about life-threatening situations we are unlikely to encounter on a regular basis, is transferred in the form of stories.

故事形式保留了信息的情感意义，从而让人们能够准确地重构它。如果你正在给小孩子讲一个关于山洞里的熊的故事，如果你突然大喊“RAAAARRGGHHH！”并用手指在空中做爪子，这确实很有帮助。每个家长都知道这一点——现在你知道为什么了。这种现象甚至有一个准科学名称——“妈妈语”，它描述了母亲在与婴儿和幼儿说话时夸张单词发音（母亲更常使用这种夸张发音）。有人推测，这与通过强调音素来帮助孩子学习语言有关。

The story format preserves the affective significance of information, so as to allow people to accurately reconstruct it. If you are telling a story about a bear in a cave to small children, it really helps if you yell the ‘RAAAARRGGHHH!’ sound unexpectedly and make claws in the air with your fingers. Every parent knows this – and now you know why. There is even a quasi-scientific name for the phenomenon – ‘Motherese’ – which describes the exaggeration of word sounds when used (more commonly by mothers) in speaking to babies and small children. It is hypothesized that this has something to do with helping children to learn a language by emphasizing the phonemes.

科学家们忽略的是，被夸大的不仅仅是声音，更重要的是情绪。这让孩子们更容易理解单词的意思，因为单词的意思本质上就是它所传达的感觉。当我们和小孩子说话时，我们会自动夸大我们的情绪表达——如果你不相信我的话，你可以自己看看。

What the scientists missed is that it is not just the sounds but – more importantly – the emotions that are exaggerated. This makes it easier for children to understand what words mean, since in essence the meaning of a word is the feeling that it conveys. When we talk to small children, we automatically exaggerate our emotional expression – take a look for yourself if you don’t believe me.

因此，孩子们在成长的过程中，通过周围人的反应来学习如何对事物做出反应。当小孩伸手去捡掉在停机坪上的棒棒糖时，焦虑的家长大喊：“别捡！”

So children make their way through the world, learning how to react to things via the reactions of people around them. ‘Don’t pick that up!’ the anxious parent yells as the small child reaches for the discarded lollipop lying on the tarmac.

随着儿童的进一步成长，他们通过一系列角色和活动逐渐融入其文化，这些角色和活动的复杂性和挑战性不断增加。例如，年幼的孩子可能会帮助准备食物，然后进行采集活动，然后逐渐进行狩猎活动，观察最终被活动本身所取代。在经历这一过程时，他们通常会得到更有经验的人的支持和指导。

As children develop further, they are introduced into their culture via a succession of roles and activities which grow in complexity and degree of challenge. For example, small children may help with some elements of food preparation, moving on to gathering activities, then graduating to hunting activities where observation is eventually replaced with the activity itself. They are usually supported and mentored by more experienced individuals as they go through this process.

这种原始的教育方式比我们今天的正规教育体系优越得多。事实上，我们仍然以这种方式学习，尽管正规教育将其逼到了我们生活的边缘——也就是说，教育积极地减少了我们学习的机会。教育是学习巢穴里的杜鹃。

This primordial educational approach is vastly superior to the formal educational system that we have today. In fact, we still learn in this way, though formal education forces it to the fringes of our existence – i.e. education actively reduces our opportunities to learn. Education is a cuckoo in the learning nest.

总的来说，教育是一种学习预防计划。确实，在接受教育期间，你会学到一些知识，但通常这些知识与课程内容无关：例如，你会了解朋友、敌人和社交互动。放学后，你会从最喜欢的电视节目中学习，或者在课桌下从社交媒体中学习。可悲的是，由于你不再花很多时间与父母在一起，你几乎不会了解他们如何谋生——这一切都对你隐藏起来了。你对生活毫无准备，会遭受双重痛苦：一次是在学校，另一次是因为你错过了发展机会。

Education is, on balance, a learning prevention scheme. It’s true that some learning will take place during your time in education, but generally this is despite the content that is on the curriculum: you learn about friends, enemies and social interaction, for example. You learn after school from your favourite TV programme, or under the desk from social media. Sadly, since you are no longer spending much time with your parents, you learn next to nothing about how they earn a living – that is all hidden from you. You are systematically unprepared for life and will suffer doubly: once during school, and again from the development you have missed.

很多受困于教育系统的教师也非常关心年轻人的发展。他们常常明显地感觉到自己在“与系统作斗争”，或者他们教育的真正价值激励、支持和鼓励人们的努力没有得到认可。这是事实。确实如此。

It is also the case that many teachers trapped in the education system care deeply about the development of young people. Often they have this palpable sense that they are ‘battling the system’ or that the real value of their efforts – inspiring, supporting and encouraging people – goes unrecognized. And this is true. It does.

那么，如果在接受教育之前学习就进展顺利的话，我们怎么会落得今天这样的境地呢？

So if learning was working fine before education, how did we end up where we are today?

自然学习方法几乎没有什么缺点，但有一个缺点却非常明显：正如我在第一章中提到的，在近代人类历史上，大型复杂社会的出现（很大程度上归功于高产农作物）使得角色的多样化程度大大提高。在此之前，如果你是女孩，你的文化禁止女孩当猎人，而你对猎人感兴趣，那么这对你来说可能是一个问题——但总体而言，角色的选择是有限的。

There are very few drawbacks to the natural approach to learning, except one that turns out to be significant: as I mentioned in the first chapter, in recent human history the creation of large, complex societies (due in large part to high-yield farm crops) allowed for explosive diversification of roles. Prior to that, it might have been a problem for you if, say, you were a girl, your culture prohibited girls from being hunters, and this turned out to be something you were interested in – but overall the choice of roles was limited.

然而，在现代社会中，角色的激增意味着你很有可能想做一些与父母选择的职业不同的事情。显而易见的解决方案是交换父母，事实上，这或多或少已经开始通过学徒制来实现。

However, in modern societies the proliferation of roles meant that there was a good chance that you might want to do something other than your parents’ chosen vocation. The obvious solution would be to swap parents and indeed this is more or less what started to happen, through a system of apprenticeships.

直到几百年前，学徒制都是复杂社会中主要的学习方式。学徒制的本质是，你通过与父母以外的人一起工作来学习如何做某事。

Apprenticeships were the dominant approach to learning in complex societies until a couple of hundred years ago. The essence of an apprenticeship is that you learn how to do something by working alongside someone who isn’t your parents.

对于那些已经处于特权地位的贵族阶级来说，实际劳动被认为是肮脏和卑鄙的，应该不惜一切代价避免。相反，他们致力于启迪知识的追求。直到最近，情况也是如此——想想看，即使是巴特利特，他在 1932 年的《幽灵之战》研究，在剑桥也被认为是一个怪人；一个富人和特权阶层中的中产阶级农场男孩。

For those already in positions of privilege, the aristocratic class, actual labour was considered grubby and demeaning and to be avoided at all costs. Instead they devoted themselves to edifying intellectual pursuits. This has also remained true until fairly recently – consider that even Bartlett, whose 1932 The War of the Ghosts study we covered earlier, was considered an oddball at Cambridge; a middle-class farm boy among the rich and privileged.

印度、中国和希腊的情况都一样：普通人学习父母的手艺或当学徒。社会精英们无所事事，便学习哲学、军事战略、诗歌、战车驾驶、音乐、舞蹈、经文、艺术或数学等。

In India, China and Greece the story was the same: normal people learned their parents’ trade or found work as an apprentice. The social elite, with nothing better to do, studied things such as philosophy, military strategy, poetry, charioteering, music, dance, scripture, art or mathematics.

中国人认为男孩在七岁时就可以开始学习写作（现代研究也广泛支持这一观点）。罗马人认为，最终，父母有责任教育孩子到一定年龄，后来发展出一套继续教育体系，最终发展出修辞学和哲学，旨在为上流社会学习法律或政治做好准备。这就是我们现代文科课程的起源。

The Chinese believed that boys were ready to start learning writing at age seven (which modern research broadly supports). The Romans believed that, ultimately, it was a parent’s responsibility to teach their children up to a certain age, later developing a system of further education which culminated in rhetoric and philosophy – intended to prepare the upper classes for law or politics. This is the origin of our modern-day liberal arts curriculum.

在英国，学徒制直到 19 世纪末都是常态。事实上，当时有一条法律禁止你从事任何行业，除非你完成了七年学徒期。1^与世界其他地方一样，精英教育之外的学校大多用于宗教教育，僧侣们接受拉丁语和后来的希腊语培训。

In England, apprenticeships were the norm until the late 19th century. In fact there was a law against practising a trade unless you had completed a seven-year apprenticeship.¹ As elsewhere in the world, what schools existed outside of elite education largely served the purposes of religious education, with monks being trained in Latin and later Greek.

免费教育的需求部分源于维多利亚时代的工业化。在棉纺厂工作的父母无法像在田里或家里一样与孩子一起工作。他们需要一个可以去的地方——一个可以为他们在工厂里的生活做好准备的地方。

The need for free schooling was in part brought about by Victorian era industrialization. Parents who went to work in cotton mills could not work alongside their children as they might have done in the fields or home. There needed to be somewhere they could go – somewhere that would prepare them for life in a factory.

需要明确的是，学校要回答的是：“我们如何防止儿童在工厂受伤？”，而不是：“什么样的环境最适合儿童学习？”从本质上讲，教育从一开始就与学习无关。

To be clear, school was the answer to the question: ‘How can we prevent children from being injured in factories?’, not: ‘What environment would be best for children’s learning?’ Education was essentially unrelated to learning from the outset.

战后，对识字工人的需求扩大了对学校教育的需求。课程本身是一种有机活动：对于幼儿来说，它以 3R（阅读、写作和算术）为中心，后来的教育则改编自中世纪的古典课程——增加了科学和文学等科目。

Later, post-war, the demand for literate workers expanded the need for schooling. The curriculum itself was something of an organic affair: for young children it centred on the 3Rs (reading, writing and arithmetic) and later years education was adapted from the medieval classical curriculum – adding subjects such as science and literature.

曾有多次尝试让课程更加实用，但都以失败告终，因为这些尝试比单纯教授 3R 课程更昂贵，而且在由一名低技能人员监督多人的系统中效果不佳。换句话说，该系统既是廉价的日托系统，也是教育系统。

At various points attempts were made to make the curriculum more practical, but these failed since they were more costly than simply teaching the 3Rs, and didn’t work well in a system where one low-skilled person monitored many. In other words, the system was as much cheap daycare as it was education.

今天，我们的学校课程是历史偶然、宗教影响和成本考虑相结合的结果，其教育体系主要是为了在工业时代提供日托和听话的工人（最后加上了为精英设计的大学体系）。

Today we have a school curriculum arrived at by a combination of historical accident, religious influence and cost considerations – delivered within an educational system largely devised to provide daycare and obedient workers for an industrial era (with a university system designed for the elite bolted on at the end).

大部分情况下，我们仍然像僧侣一样排成一排坐着写作。尽管有那么多自私的研究，但这并没有真正的科学依据：教育教授们无视那些表明讲座无效的研究，^继续进行这种仪式。成为关注的焦点真好。整个事情就是一个赚钱的大杂烩——一个自给自足的官僚机构。

For the most part we still sit in rows writing, much like monks. Despite all the self-serving research, it doesn’t really have a scientific basis: professors of education ignore research showing lectures to be ineffective,² and continue the ritual. It’s nice to be the centre of attention. The whole thing is a money-making hotch-potch – a self-sustaining bureaucracy.

但导致我们今天所处体系的历史偶然事件并不是我们问题的根源。无论教育方法是什么——无论人们是排成一排坐着还是通过电子学习模块进行点击——其根本思想都是一样的，正是这种思想腐蚀了我们采取的每一种教育方法。

But the historical accidents that led to the system we have today are not the root cause of our troubles. Whatever the educational method – whether people are sitting in rows or clicking their way through e-learning modules – the underlying thinking is the same and it is this thinking that corrupts every single approach to education that we take.

这种想法就是“知识转移”。我们开始认为，人类的大脑储存信息，就像书页一样，而且将信息（强制）灌输到人们头脑中的方法：通过对他们讲话，让他们盯着信息，一遍又一遍地重复，把它写下来。

The thinking is ‘knowledge transfer’. We fell into thinking that the human mind stores information, much like the pages of a book, and that there are methods of (forcibly) putting that information into people’s heads: by talking at them, by getting them to stare at the information, repeat it over and over again, write it down.

但人们不会储存信息——他们储存对信息的反应，然后重建信息。他们根据经验给他们带来的感受重建信息。当我们坐在教室里，或者在另一个电子学习模块中点击“下一步”时，我们只会感到无聊。

But people don’t store information – they store their reactions to it then reconstruct it. They reconstruct it based on how experiences made them feel. And as we sit in class, or click ‘next’ through another e-learning module, we feel only bored.

我的意思是：教育（很大程度上）包括一系列焦虑驱动的测试，为了应对这些测试，我们试图将尽可能多的信息塞进我们的大脑。焦虑源于这样一个神话：我们未来的成功取决于我们在这些测试中的表现。我们设计了一个充满惩罚和奖励的世界，以保持学习正在发生的幻觉，而教育就是学习的源泉。我们教人们专心做他们被告知的事情，并建立了一个全球性的营地网络，我们强迫我们的孩子参加，互相安慰，说这对他们有好处。

What I mean is this: education (largely) comprises a series of anxiety-driven tests, in service of which we try to cram as much information into our heads as possible. The anxiety stems from the myth that our future success depends on our performance on these tests. We have engineered a world of punishments and rewards to preserve the illusion that learning is taking place, and that education delivers it. We teach people to concentrate on doing what they’re told, and have built a global network of camps into which we force our children, reassuring each other that it is good for them.

教育是一种糟糕的学习模式，更糟糕的是绩效模式。我不是唯一怀疑这一点的人，但由于缺乏替代模式，许多教育人员不知道还能做什么，而许多企业学习人员仍在努力进行教育。

Education is a terrible model for learning, and an even worse model for performance. I am not the only person who suspects this to be the case, but in the absence of an alternative model many education people don’t know what else to do, and many corporate learning people are still trying to educate.

能够在移动设备上访问有用的东西是导致其衰落的一个重要原因——人们现在能够自己解决问题。他们不是在“自我教育”（在线教育平台的使用仍然很少）——他们只是在完成任务。他们每天都使用资源，但从不使用课程。

Being able to access useful stuff on your mobile device is a big part of why it is falling apart – people are now able to figure things out for themselves. They are not ‘educating themselves’ (use of online educational platforms is still pitiful) – they are just getting things done. They use resources every day, but never courses.

我们喜欢 TED 上关于在线学院的演讲，但我们几乎没人会在那里花太多时间。领先的学术机构慷慨地将数千门世界一流的课程免费提供到网上！你曾经上过一门吗？教育界的高层人士对慷慨地通过视频流向撒哈拉以南非洲人民提供牛津剑桥讲座大加赞赏——好像这除了消耗他们的数据流量外还能做什么（当然，如果你想要证书，需要付费！）。

We like TED talks about online academies, but almost none of us will have spent much time there. Leading academic institutions have generously made thousands of their world-class courses available online – for free! Have you ever completed one? The high priests of education rhapsodize about magnanimously offering Oxbridge lectures via video stream to folks in sub-Saharan Africa – as if this would do anything more than burn through their data allowance (and of course if you want a certificate it is available at a price!).

我还记得我们曾经举办过有关 Microsoft Office 最新更新的研讨会。现在我们只是继续这样做。不幸的是，一些关于你的工作场所的“有用信息”（例如做事的最佳方式）可能不在互联网上。

I still remember the days when we used to run workshops on the latest updates to Microsoft Office. Now we just get on with it. Unfortunately, some of the ‘useful stuff’ about your place of work (such as the best ways of doing things) may not be on the internet.

你可能会认为教育工作者会急于填补这一空白——几十年来，他们的声誉一直受到损害，因为他们无法令人信服地证明自己对组织——企业——的贡献。人们总是抱怨教育无法为职场做好准备。但事实并非如此。

You would think that educators would be rushing to plug this gap – their reputation has suffered from decades of inability to produce a convincing case for the contribution they make to organizations – businesses consistently complain that education is poor preparation for the world of work. But they are not.

相反，许多教育行业都在忙于梦想利用移动设备做以前从未奏效过的同样可怕的事情——推出少量内容并测试人们，而不是告诉人们他们可以开发有用的东西（资源）来帮助他们完成工作（以用户为中心的学习设计）。

Instead, much of the education industry is busy dreaming up ways of using mobile devices to do the same terrible things that never worked before – pushing out little bits of content and testing people, rather than talking to people about the useful stuff they might develop (resources) to help them do their jobs (user-centred learning design).

讽刺的是，正是那些赋予学习专业人士身份感的东西——教学设计、知识转移、学习理论——阻碍了他们做出贡献。因此，需要进行这种观点的转变——转向帮助人们而不是向他们倾倒内容。无论多少技术或营销都无法修复一个破碎的模型。人工智能 (AI) 和虚拟现实 (VR) 不会证明是更有效的倾倒内容的方式。如果我们想改善教育，我们需要了解学习。

Ironically the very things that give learning professionals their sense of identity – instructional design, knowledge transfer, learning theory – are preventing them from making a contribution. So it is this shift of perspective – towards helping people rather than dumping content on them – that needs to take place. No amount of technology or marketing will fix a broken model. Artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) will not prove more effective ways of dumping content. If we want to improve education, we need to understand learning.

聪明的教育者直觉地意识到有些事情不对劲，并找到了让学生关心的方法（通过使信息个性化或相关化、通过纯粹的热情或通过其他方式使其生动起来）——但整个系统诉诸暴力：鞭笞和威胁，当这些事情被禁止时——考试。考试的唯一目的是让人们感到足够焦虑以记住。这是一种让人们关心的廉价方式。

Smart educators intuitively grasped that something was wrong, and found ways to make students care (by making information personal or relevant, through sheer enthusiasm, or by bringing it to life in other ways) – but the system as a whole resorted to violence: canings and threats, and when these things were prohibited – tests. Tests, whose sole purpose is to make people feel anxious enough to remember. A cheap way to make people care.

结果是，我们在思考学习和教育时变得完全糊涂了，而实际上这两者是完全不同的东西。教育之于学习就像顺势疗法之于医学。它们听起来可能很相似，但教育只是一系列特殊的仪式——比如用餐礼仪——而学习描述了我们在认知上适应周围世界的方式。在这个比喻中，学习有点像“消化”。

The upshot is that we have become utterly muddled in thinking about learning and education, when really the two are really completely different things. Education is to learning as homeopathy is to medicine. They might sound similar, but education is a merely a series of peculiar rituals – like dining etiquette – whilst learning describes the way we adapt, cognitively, to the world around us. In this analogy, learning is a bit like ‘digestion’.

教育不重视学习的原因与顺势疗法不重视医学的原因完全相同，即：他们认为他们已经在这样做了，而接受他们没有这样做（并且从来没有这样做过）这一事实将难以忍受。

The reason education pays no heed to learning is precisely the same reason homeopathy pays no heed to medicine, namely: they think they are doing it already, and accepting that they are not (and never have been) would be too much to bear.

因此，每当你听到“学习”这个词时，就值得停下来思考一下它到底是指学习还是指教育。百分之九十九，当人们说学习时，他们实际上指的是教育。

So whenever you hear the word ‘learning’ used, it is worth pausing to consider whether it is really being used to refer to learning, or to education. Ninety-nine times out of 100, when people say learning, they really mean education.

如今，这个问题已经非常严重，因为很多声称与人类学习有关的研究实际上与记忆事物或通过考试等有关——因此实际上与教育有关，因此根本无法告诉你有关学习的太多信息。当你在教育背景下问：“你到底为什么要这样做！？”时，人们可以轻率地提出合理化解释：“这是基于科学证据的”，却忽视了科学证据与学习无关（类似于我之前给出的艾宾浩斯/火星人的例子）。

Today the problem is really chronic, since much of the research that purports to be about human learning actually turns out to concern something like memorizing things or passing tests – and so is really about education, so won’t tell you much about learning at all. When you ask: ‘Why on earth are you doing that!?’ in an educational context, people can blithely trot out the rationalization: ‘It’s based on scientific evidence’, conveniently overlooking that the scientific evidence has nothing to do with learning (similar to the Ebbinghaus/Martian examples I gave earlier).

例如，很少有学术论文考虑讲故事——不像洛夫特斯和巴特利特的研究（尽管讲故事是我们明确交换信息的默认方式）。在“学习行业”，我们充斥着“学习管理系统”、“学习会议”和“学习设计”——所有这些实际上都是关于教育的，因为它们的重点基本上是如何让人们记住事实，以便他们能够通过某种测试。事实上，如果你告诉你的普通员工他们将不得不学习，他们首先会问的一个问题是：“会有测试吗？”

Very few academic papers consider storytelling, for example – unlike Loftus’ and Bartlett’s work (this despite storytelling being our default means of explicitly exchanging information). In the ‘learning industry’ we are awash with ‘learning management systems’ and ‘learning conferences’ and ‘learning design’ – all of which are actually about education, since their focus is essentially on ways of getting people to memorize facts so they can pass some kind of test. In fact if you tell your average employee that they are going to have to do some learning one of the first questions they ask is: ‘Will there be a test?’

我们自欺欺人地认为这些仪式与能力发展有关。我们的会议就像是雨舞者的聚会，大家开会讨论舞蹈动作的技巧和调整：“如果你左右摇头，雨下得更大一点。”

We kid ourselves that these rituals have anything to with capability development. Our conferences are a like a gathering of rain-dancers meeting to discuss tips and tweaks to our dance routines: ‘If you shake your head from side to side, it rains a little harder’.

就我而言，当我谈论“教育”时，有时不清楚我在谈论的是公共教育系统还是私人、企业教育系统——或者它们之间有什么区别。

For my part, when I talk about ‘education’ it is sometimes unclear whether I am talking about the public education system or the private, corporate, education system – or what the difference is.

今天，基本的假设是相同的，但交付模式却截然不同：我们通常全日制就读于公共教育系统，我们的进步通常通过里程碑评估来衡量。一旦我们离开公共教育系统，步入职场，我们通常会把这一切抛在身后。绝大多数大学毕业生继续从事不相关的领域——这是对整个系统冗余性的一个非常默认的承认。

Today, the underlying assumptions are the same, but the delivery models are quite different: we are typically enrolled full-time in the public education system, and our progress is generally measured through milestone assessments. Once we leave the public education system and enter the world of work, we usually leave all that behind. The vast majority of university graduates go on to work in unrelated fields – an extraordinary tacit acknowledgement of the redundancy of the system as a whole.

此后，正规教育最多只能是零星的，并且围绕我们要扮演的角色或——更可能是——组织必须满足的监管和合规要求展开。在这种情况下，我们通常会采用公共教育模式：人们坐在一排排的座位上听讲座或在线查看屏幕上的信息。通常最后会有一次测试。

Thereafter, formal education is likely to be sporadic at best, and oriented around the role that we are to do or – more likely – the regulatory and compliance requirements that the organization is required to meet. Where this takes place, we often fall back on the public education model: people sit in rows of seats listening to a lecture or review screens of information online. Often there is a test at the end.

故事中真正奇怪的转折是，企业教育在设计其学习解决方案时，在很大程度上忽略了受人尊敬的学术机构所做的教育研究，结果却发现，这些受人尊敬的学术机构现在正在向它们寻求创新学习交付模式（例如，使用电子学习或视频内容）。教育教授们惊讶地发现，采购团队购买了一个学习管理系统，该系统可以有效地将他们的讲座重新制作成一系列视频，所有这些都是为了追求财务效率，并基于与大企业的一些基准比较。

In a truly bizarre twist in the tale, corporate education largely ignores the educational research produced by respected academic institutions in the design of its learning solutions, only to find that those same respected academic institutions are now looking to them for models of innovative learning delivery (for example, use of e-learning or video content). Professors of education are gobsmacked to discover that the procurement team have purchased a learning management system that will efficiently regurgitate their lectures as a series of videos, all in the pursuit of financial efficiency, and based on some benchmarking comparison with Big Business.

抛开动荡不谈，随着时间的推移，这两个系统似乎会融合成一个连续的而不是不连续的系统，因为它们将更多地关注学习而不是教育，而是沿着一种梯度运行。教育过程开始时和结束时的学习之间的主要区别在于：开始时我们的关注点（我们关心的事情）相当广泛，并且仍然处于不断变化的状态。到最后，我们通常会更清楚地了解我们想成为什么样的人以及我们想做什么。

Setting aside the turbulence, it seems likely that over time these two systems will merge into a continuous rather than discontinuous system as they become more about learning than education, and will instead operate along a kind of gradient. The main difference between learning at the start of the educational process and at the end of the process is this: at the start our concerns (the things we care about) are quite broad and still in a state of flux. Towards the end, we will often have a much clearer understanding of who we want to be and what we are trying to do.

这意味着一开始重点更多地放在“推动”型学习设计上。这并不意味着像我们今天这样强迫人们接受主题，而是意味着创造一个探索性环境，人们可以（以一种好玩的方式）尝试各种各样的挑战和模拟体验。

This means that at the outset the focus is much more on ‘push’-type learning design. This doesn’t mean force-feeding people topics in the way that we do today, it means creating an exploratory environment where people can experiment (in a playful way) with a wide variety of challenges and simulated experiences.

另一方面，人们通过完成许多挑战获得金钱，因为他们已经达到了一定的能力水平，因此重点更多地放在“拉动”型设计上——提供一个丰富的环境，为他们提供进一步学习所需的各种资源。

At the other end of the scale, people are earning money for many of the challenges they complete, because they have achieved a level of competence, and so the emphasis is much more on ‘pull’-type design – on providing an environment rich in the kinds of resources they might need to further their learning.

简单地说，学习一开始更多的是探索经验和挑战；后来，它更多的是获取资源。

To put it simply, at the start learning tends to be more about exploring experiences and challenges; later on, it becomes more about access to resources.

值得注意的是，这些并不是绝对的区别；比如说，网络战争专家可能仍会选择花一些时间探索他们能力不强的挑战，比如烹饪。当他们致力于网络战争挑战时，他们可能会赚钱，并与能力稍差的人分享他们的专业知识。当他们致力于烹饪时，他们可能会为这些经验付费，并在比他们更熟练的人的陪伴下解决更简单的挑战。

It’s important to note that these are not absolute distinctions; a person who is, say, an expert in cyber-warfare may still choose to spend some of their time exploring challenges where they don’t have much capability – cookery, for example. As they work on cyber-warfare challenges they are likely to be earning money and sharing their expertise with people who are slightly less competent. As they work on cookery, they are likely to be paying for these experiences and tackling simpler challenges in the company of people more skilled than they are.

从商业角度看教育

Education from a commercial standpoint

当今的教育模式有点像“现金换证书”计划。这个故事的简化版本是这样的：年轻人被告知，资格证书是日后成功的关键。他们花了十多年的时间记笔记和备考，然后花了三年时间听别人谈论一个话题，记笔记和写论文。每次考试前不久，他们都会尽可能多地记住笔记，以便通过考试并获得证书。

Today’s educational model is something like a ‘cash for certificates’ scheme. A simplified version of the story goes like this: young people are told that qualifications are essential for success in later life. They spend over a decade taking notes and cramming for exams, then three years listening to someone talk about a topic, taking notes and writing essays. Shortly before each examination, they memorize as much of their notes as possible so that they can pass and receive a certificate.

然后，任务完成之后，他们就会忘记这些信息，开始申请工作，向潜在雇主出示证书，作为他们适合这份工作的证据。他们的学习不太可能与他们的工作领域有太大关系，但证书表明他们知道如何静坐、闭嘴并按照吩咐去做。

Then, mission accomplished, they forget much of this information and start to apply for jobs, presenting their certificate to potential employers as evidence of their suitability for the role. It is unlikely that their study will bear much relation to their field of work, however the certificate suggests that they know how to sit still, shut up and do as they are told.

当他们开始工作时，他们会通过观察他人、谷歌搜索、提问以及（在某种程度上）反复试验来学习如何做好自己的工作。他们的雇主可能会提供某种形式的正式培训，但（同样）这与他们需要做的工作关系不大，而且通常是以下两种类型之一：降低公司风险所需的合规活动，或结识其他员工并感受到被重视的机会。

When they start work, they learn how to do their job through observing others, Google, asking questions and – to some extent – trial and error. Their employer may provide some form of formal training but (again) this bears little relation to the job they are required to do and is typically one of two types: compliance activity required to reduce corporate risk, or an opportunity to meet other employees and feel valued.

这样一来，几乎所有的学习都是在教育环境之外以完全不同的方式进行的。事实上，教育发生在应该学习的时候——它把学习机会推到一边。在学校度过漫长的一天后，小孩子最想做的就是和朋友一起玩。

In this way it happens that almost all learning happens outside of educational contexts, and in an entirely different fashion. Indeed, education happens when learning should be taking place – it pushes learning opportunities to one side. After a long day at school, the small child wants nothing more than to play with friends.

我对教育的评价可能显得有些夸张。但也许我们对正在发生的事情还不够愤怒。雅克·潘克塞普在他的《情感神经科学》一书中写道：

It may seem that I am being melodramatic in my assessment of education. But perhaps we are insufficiently outraged by what is going on. In his book Affective Neuroscience Jaak Panksepp writes:

如果注意力缺陷多动障碍（ADHD）至少有一部分是由过度玩乐引起的，那么它是否符合伦理道德就会成为一个深刻的社会问题用药物来改变儿童的这些特征。显然，在课堂上保持对学术问题的关注是必不可少的，但通过药物手段诱导儿童服从是否合适？……这一点尤其重要，因为这些药物可能会对大脑儿茶酚胺系统的反应性产生长期变化，就像精神兴奋剂引起的敏化现象一样^。3

If at least part of ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder] is caused by excessive playfulness, it becomes a profound societal issue whether it is ethical to drug children for such traits. Obviously it is essential to maintain attention to academic matter in the classroom, but is it appropriate to induce compliance in children through pharmacological means?... This is especially important in light of the possibility that such drugs can produce long-lasting changes in the responsivity of brain catecholamine systems, as is seen in the psychostimulant-induced sensitization phenomenon.³

在我看来，雅克的意思是，我们准备对儿童进行脑损伤，以抑制他们正常的学习表达，并迫使他们遵守仪式化的教育制度的要求。我们不仅将责任归咎于儿童而不是教育制度，而且我们还将玩乐“病态化”，以便提供制度上的正当理由。重新使用藤条——这会更加人道。

In my terms, Jaak is suggesting that we are prepared to brain-damage children in order to suppress the normal expression of learning, and force them to comply with the demands of a ritualized education system. Not only have we laid the blame with the child rather than the educational system, we have ‘pathologized’ playfulness in order to provide an institutional justification. Bring back the cane – it would be far more humane.

当然也有例外。热情的教育工作者有时会受到支持其所照顾的人发展的愿望的激励。从直觉上讲，他们认识到知识转移学习模式存在问题，因此他们会花时间了解学生，使材料具有相关性，并激发他们对所在领域的热情。

There are, of course, exceptions to this. Passionate educators are sometimes motivated by a desire to support the development of people in their care. At an intuitive level they recognize that there is something wrong with the knowledge transfer model of learning, and consequently they take the time to get to know students, to make material relevant, and to inspire passion for their field.

无论是在学术还是企业环境中，优秀的教育者都会很快意识到“练习和测试”方法在最好的情况下是无效的，在最坏的情况下是有害的。因此，他们经常悄悄地颠覆课程的纯粹性：通过构建显然有益于学习体验的体验和活动，通过对学生产生兴趣并相应地调整示例——他们的方法没有任何正式的基础，但他们坚信自己在做正确的事情。他们确实在做正确的事情。

Whether in an academic or corporate setting, good educators quickly realize that the ‘drill and test’ approach is at best ineffective and at worst damaging. As a result they often quietly subvert the purity of the curriculum: by building experiences and activities that self-evidently benefit the learning experience, by taking an interest in their students and adapting the examples accordingly – without having any formal basis for their approach, but a conviction that they are doing the right thing. And they are.

时不时地，我们都会偶然发现一些令人振奋的见证，这些见证来自一位老师，他的生活因此变得更好。我鼓励你仔细听听他们说了什么：总是会出现这样的话：“他们相信我”、“他们鼓舞人心”、“他们真的很关心我”和“他们花时间去了解我”。

Every so often one will stumble across a heartening testimonial from someone whose life has been changed for the better by a teacher. I would encourage you to listen closely to what is said: invariably phrases like: ‘They believed in me’, ‘They were inspirational’, ‘They really cared about me’ and ‘They took time to get to know me’ come up.

我们已经习惯了听到这些事情，以至于完全忽略了它们的重要性：没有人谈论记忆信息；好老师的影响在于他们如何让人们感受到，而不是他们知道什么。一旦人们有了某种感觉，他们就会自己去做“知道”的部分。

We have become so used to hearing these sorts of things, that we entirely overlook their significance: nobody talks about memorizing information; the impact made by good teachers is on how they made people feel, not what they know. The ‘knowing’ part people will do for themselves, once they feel a certain way.

激励学生，他们可能会取得伟大的成就——但老师们是否教过如何让学生感受到？我的意思是仔细分析和描绘他们今天的感受，利用这些坐标，通过一段复杂的相互关联的感受之旅，绘制出通往未来的路线。

Inspire a student, and they may go on to achieve great things – but are teachers taught how to make students feel? I mean to carefully analyse and map how they feel today, using those co-ordinates to chart a course to the future via a complex journey of interrelated feelings.

近年来，金融业抓住机会利用教育系统获取更多回报——至少在英国和美国是如此。现在，雪上加霜的是，年轻人被要求借入巨额贷款（约 40,000 英镑）来支付他们的高等教育费用，并承诺如果他们有幸找到一份高薪工作，他们将在有生之年偿还这笔贷款。

In recent years the finance sector has seized on an opportunity to harness the education system for ever greater returns – at least in the UK and US. Now, to add insult to injury, young people are required to take out enormous loans (circa £40,000) to pay for their higher education experience, on the promise that they will repay the money during their lifetime should they be fortunate enough to find themselves in a job that is well paid.

这确实是一个狡猾的骗局，因为它利用了这个年龄段的人相对缺乏思考未来的能力，以及他们渴望玩乐和交朋友的心理。教育已经成为一种经济契约。

This really is a sneaky scheme, since it plays on the relative inability of people of this age to think about their future, and their desire to have fun and make friends. Education has become a form of financial indenture.

在 2020 年疫情期间，这种诡计似乎被识破了：学生们因害怕感染病毒而无法去上课，而是在自己的卧室里观看讲座的视频录像。

During the pandemic year 2020, it seemed the ruse might be up: students unable to attend lectures for fear of contracting the virus instead watched video recordings of lectures from their bedrooms.

我们慢慢意识到，为了享受观看人们枯燥地背诵本来可以在网上免费获得的信息的乐趣而借入数万英镑似乎不太合理。

Slowly it dawned on us all that borrowing tens of thousands of pounds for the pleasure of watching people drearily recite information which could easily have been obtained for free on the internet didn’t seem… rational.

在线讲座的出席人数急剧下降，似乎游戏可能要结束了。荒谬的推论 正在上演：如果在线视频讲座只不过是人们照本宣科，为什么不直接把教科书发给人们，让他们按照自己的节奏学习呢？但人们会花 4 万英镑买一本教科书，最后还要参加在线多项选择考试吗？天哪。

Attendance at online lectures plummeted, and it seemed the game might be up. The reductio ad absurdum was being played out: if the online video lectures consisted of little more than people reading from a script, why not simply send people the textbook and allow them to learn at their own pace? But would people pay £40,000 for a textbook and an online multiple-choice examination at the end? Oh dear.

因此，政府不顾感染风险，协同鼓励学生返回大学——即使这意味着他们将被限制在宿舍里——以便继续赚钱的把戏。

So the government was complicit in encouraging the students to return to their universities despite the risks of infection – even if it meant that they would be confined to halls of residence – so that the money-making charade could continue.

当然，学生们明白，他们付出的代价其实是三年的派对和自我发现（与父母保持安全距离），他们觉得他们有权无视这些限制。他们也确实这么做了。叛逆行为必须被镇压。整个事情变成了一场闹剧。

Of course students grasped that what they had paid dearly for was really three years of partying and self-discovery (at a safe distance from their parents), and felt they were entitled to ignore the restrictions. And they did. Acts of rebellion had to be quashed. The whole thing descended into farce.

教育该如何进行？

How should education work?

当你和人们谈论教育时，一个很快会出现的问题就是：“教育的目的是什么？”这个问题的问题在于它往往会使讨论两极分化：一方面，有些人认为教育应该是“教化”或“激情”，使个人能够做到最好。另一方面，更务实的教育家认为教育应该是让人们具备在社会中发挥有用作用的能力。

When you talk to people about education, a question that quickly comes up is: ‘What is the purpose of education?’ The problem with this question is it tends to polarize the discussion: on the one hand some people believe that education should be about ‘edification’ or ‘passion’, enabling the individual to be the best that they can be. On the other hand, more pragmatic educationalists feel that education should be about equipping people to play a useful role in society.

这两组人对于谁在“控制”这一过程有着相应的观点——在第一种情况下，控制者是学习者，在后一种情况下，控制者是老师（或教育系统）。

These two groups have corresponding perspectives on who is ‘in control’ of the process – in the first case the learner is in control, in the latter the teacher (or education system).

答案当然是，这两件事并不矛盾——你可以同时做这两件事。但目前，这两件事都还没有完成。

The answer, of course, is that these two things are not incompatible – you can do both. But today, neither is accomplished.

如果我们使用推拉框架，我们可以更清楚地了解这应该如何运作：教育应该更像是一场对话，而不是一场讲座。在对话中，问谁在控制是没有意义的——因为如果有人“在控制”，那么对话可能就不怎么好。通常，对话一开始并不清楚会走向何方——人们会分享和探索各自的兴趣。如果对话者在一开始就想好了他们想要表达的一些观点，那么这种对话很少会被认为是一次很好的对话。

If we use our push–pull framework, we can get a clearer idea of how this should work: education should be more like a conversation than a lecture. In a conversation, it doesn’t make sense to ask who is in control – since if someone is ‘in control’ it’s probably not a great conversation. Often, it is not clear where a conversation will go at the outset – rather people share and explore their respective interests. A conversation where someone has in mind a number of points they wanted to get across at the outset is rarely experienced as a great conversation.

教育有时被称为“指导”，但使用“对话”一词会是更好的选择，因为当我们使用“对话”一词时，我们明白它不是一个我们记忆事物的正式过程，并且参与者之间存在一些持续的互动，从而取得进展，对话是健康的。

Education is sometimes talked about as ‘instruction’, but the word ‘dialogue’ would be a far better term to use, because when we use the term ‘dialogue’ we understand that it is not a formal process in which we memorize things, and that there is some ongoing interaction between participants which results in progress, where the dialogue is healthy.

教育也是如此：它既有“推动”的因素，也有“拉动”的因素，需要通过一个相互的过程不断保持平衡。仅仅让孩子“追随自己的热情”是不够的——这些热情提供了最初的动力，但应该通过社会通过对话和探索提供的各种途径来引导。教育的作用是将热情转化为令人满意的工作。

So it is with education: it has both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ elements, and these need to be constantly balanced through a process that is reciprocal. It is not enough that a child should ‘follow their passions’ – these passions provide an initial momentum, but should be steered through the various avenues that society provides through conversation and exploration. Education serves to shape passion into fulfilling employment.

我的意思是，当孩子进入教育过程时，他们已经有了驱动他们学习的关注点和兴趣；他们可能对动物、火车或芭蕾舞感兴趣。动物园管理员、火车司机或芭蕾舞演员的工作确实有限，但在这个早期阶段，孩子的兴趣是相当可塑和普遍的。

What I mean by this is that by the time a child enters an educational process, they already have concerns and interests that are driving their learning; they may be interested in animals, or trains, or ballet. It is true that there are only so many jobs for zoo-keepers or train-drivers or ballerinas, but at this early stage a child’s interests are quite malleable and generalized.

也许对火车感兴趣的人对机械的东西有更普遍的感觉，或者在墙上贴芭蕾舞演员照片的人对服装或舞蹈编排感兴趣。了解动物园可能会让你学到很多关于经营小企业的知识。也许有人真正寻求的是关爱他人的机会，或者是一种安全感。

It may be that someone interested in trains has a more general feeling for things mechanical, or that someone who posts pictures of ballerinas on their wall is interested in costume or choreography. Learning about zoos might teach you a lot about running a small business. It might be that what someone is really seeking is an opportunity to care for others, or a sense of security.

教育系统面临选择，是让人们追求自己的激情，还是将他们培养成有生产力的工人，这种想法是一种错误的两难境地。无论你是海蜗牛还是人类，你只需要考虑两个系统：你关心的事物的模式，以及世界你会发现自己身处其中。这两件事相互作用，在你的一生中相互塑造。这就是学习的目的。

The idea that an education system faces a choice between allowing people to pursue their passions and shaping them into productive workers is a false dilemma. Whether you are a sea-snail or a human, there are just two systems to consider: the pattern of things that you care about, and the world you find yourself in. These two things interact, shaping each other throughout your life. That’s what learning is for.

最好的结果是，你发现自己身处一个与你关心的事情相一致的世界；最糟糕的结果是，你感觉被困在一份糟糕的工作中，没有做任何对你真正重要的事情。

The best outcome is that you find yourself in a world aligned with your cares; the worst is that you feel trapped in a crappy job doing none of the things that really matter to you.

那么问题是：一个人所关心的事情如何才能变得精致，并与他们所生活的世界保持一致？答案是：通过这个过程的两个“推”和“拉”部分。

So the question is: how do the things a person cares about become refined and aligned with the world in which they live? The answer is: through the two ‘push’ and ‘pull’ parts of the process.

教育的“拉动”部分涉及了解学习者以及推动他们学习的因素——他们的情感背景。情感背景描述了某事物（在本例中为个人）的所有情感特征。在这里，它指的是他们所关心的一切（而不是“他们所知道的一切”）。我还将讨论增加情感背景的经历——我的意思是改变一个人所关心事物的经历。

The ‘pull’ part of education involves understanding the learner and what drives their learning – their affective context. Affective context describes all of the affective features of something, in this case the individual. Here, it means the totality of their cares (rather than ‘everything they know’). I will also talk about experiences which add affective context – by which I mean experiences that shift what a person cares about.

打个比方，你可以把情感语境想象成一幅人物画，画中每个颜色点都代表着他们关心的事物。从最基本的分析层面来看，情感语境描述了一个人是谁。它让你和我不同。随着时间的推移，情感语境会不断发展和变化，因此这个过程是持续的。

As a metaphor, you can imagine affective context as a painting of a person, where each point of colour corresponds to something that they care about. At the most fundamental level of analysis, affective context describes who someone is. It is what makes you different from me. This will continue to evolve and change over time so the process is ongoing.

学习的“推动”部分涉及使用提供情感情境的方法——例如具有挑战性的环境、故事、模拟等方法——所有这些方法都有能力引导学习者朝着新的方向前进。

The ‘push’ part of learning involves using methods that contribute affective context – methods such as challenging environments, stories, simulations – all of which have the capacity to steer the learner in new directions.

在你的一生中，你经历过的事情塑造了你所关心的事情。这些事情可能是你崇拜的虚构人物，你敬佩的朋友——它们可能是一些糟糕的经历，或者仅仅是一句评论。每一件事都感动了我们，让我们走上了一条不同的轨迹。

Things have happened to you, during the course of your life, that have shaped what you care about. These things might be a fictional character that you idolized, friends that you admired – they might have been some awful experience, or merely a single comment. Each moved us, tilted us in an alternate trajectory.

其中许多可能是偶然的，或在很大程度上是无意的：你的父母会努力树立一个好榜样，电影制作人会考虑他们所传递的信息，但世界和你的担忧之间的确切联系仍然更多的是魔法和直觉，而不是科学和工艺。教育提供了改变这种状况的机会，通过了解哪些经历会与哪些担忧产生共鸣。

Many of these may have been accidental, or largely unwitting: your parents will try to set a good example, movie-makers will consider the messages they are sending, but the precise interlock between the world and your concerns is still more magic and intuition than it is science and craft. Education presents the opportunity to change that, through understanding which experiences will resonate with which concerns.

这与我们今天所做的事情确实有很大不同：它是关于提供机会亲身体验各种不同的情况，在支持性环境中应对日益复杂的挑战。

This is really quite different to what we do today: it is about providing opportunities to experience a multitude of different situations first-hand, tackling challenges of increasing sophistication in a supportive environment.

正如我上面提到的那样——这与几千年来的学习方式并没有什么不同，孩子们先帮助父母完成简单的任务，然后是更复杂的任务。然而，在当今复杂的社会中，我们不能简单地让父母带孩子去上班。

As I noted above – this is really not unlike the way that learning has taken place for thousands of years, with children helping their parents with simple, then more complex tasks. However in today’s complex society we cannot simply fall back on allowing parents to take their children to work.

这实际上是一个很好的解决方案，但现代文化中，孩子们想追随父母的脚步这一假设可能并不合理。没错，孩子们在开会时可能会感到无聊，但我也是。也许我们可以开出更好的会议。用蜡笔和橡皮泥。

This would actually be a pretty good solution, were it not for the problem that in modern culture the assumption that children want to follow in their parents’ footsteps is probably not a good one. True, children might be bored in meetings, but then so am I. Maybe we would have better meetings. With crayons and Play-Doh.

正如神经科学家安东尼奥·达马西奥在其著作《事物的奇怪秩序》中指出的那样：“事实证明，我们的情感机制在一定程度上是可以培养的，我们所谓的文明很大一部分是通过在家庭、学校和文化等有利环境中对这种机制的培养而产生的。” ⁴

As the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio notes in his book The Strange Order of Things: ‘It turns out that the machinery of our affect is educable, to a certain extent, and that a good part of what we call civilization occurs through the education of that machinery in a conducive environment of home, school and culture’.⁴

但如今的学校教育并不那么有利。事实上，情况恰恰相反——教育工作者们根本不关心“情感机制”，他们只是努力教授标准课程，让学生通过考试。

But today school is not really conducive. In fact, quite the opposite – educators are not remotely concerned with the ‘machinery of affect’ as they plough through the standard curriculum in order that students can pass a test.

那么，如何创建一个让孩子们体验和探索不同角色的系统呢？你可以建立一个实习或学徒制系统，或者你可以创建一个学习“生态系统”，将支持性环境中的人为挑战逐渐融入工作场所的真实挑战中，例如通过提供模拟或简化的学习环境。换句话说，你可以将学习带入工作中，也可以将工作带入学习中。也许我们需要两者兼顾。如果我们成功做到这一点，学习和工作都会开始感觉更像是玩耍，两者的区别就会开始消失。

So how would you create a system where children get to experience and explore different roles? You might have a system of placements or apprenticeships – or you could create a learning ‘ecosystem’ which gradually blends artificial challenges in a supportive environment into real challenges in the workplace, for example by providing simulated or simplified learning environments. In other words, you could take the learning into work, or you could take the work into learning. Probably we will need to do both. If we accomplish this successfully, both learning and work will start to feel more like play and the distinction will begin to evaporate.

这种模式的成本可能远高于让人们坐在房间里，让低薪人员在黑板上写字；但值得注意的是，所提出的模式将学习和工作融为一体。也就是说，人们在开始时应对的简单挑战（例如将几个单词翻译成另一种语言）可能纯粹是一种学习练习，但随着挑战变得越来越复杂，它们很快就会变成实际的、有偿的工作。这是一个赚钱的教育系统。

Such a model may well cost more than sitting people in a room and having someone on a low wage write things on a board; but it is worth bearing in mind that the proposed model integrates learning and work. That is to say, the simple challenges that people tackle at the start of the process (for example translating a few words into another language) may be purely a learning exercise, but as challenges grow in complexity they quickly become actual, paid, work. This is an education system that makes money.

现行制度的弊端之一是，它不必要地将个人幼稚化，阻止他们在达到一定年龄之前完成许多他们完全有能力完成的任务。技术开始破坏这一现状，例如，允许年轻人通过直播他们的游戏玩法赚钱，或者通过他们滑稽的舞步赚取广告收入，完全脱离学校/工作系统。

One of the ill-effects of the current system is that it unnecessarily infantilizes individuals, preventing them from undertaking a great many tasks of which they are perfectly capable, until they reach a certain age. Technology is beginning to undermine this, for example allowing a young person to make money by streaming their game-play or earn advertising revenue from their comical dance moves, entirely outside of the school/work system.

因此，防止童工的美好愿望却产生了可怕的适得其反的效果，阻碍了人们发现他们喜欢做的事情，阻碍了他们的发展，并推迟了他们进入社会。

A laudable desire to prevent child labour has therefore backfired horribly, preventing people from discovering the things they enjoy doing, stunting their development, and delaying their entry into society.

在上面概述的模型中，你可能还会想：为什么不简单地关注教育的“推动”方面——为什么要费心去理解和适应学习者关心的问题？为什么不简单地使用一系列引人入胜的方法（例如热情的教师、讲故事和模拟）来按照社会的要求塑造人呢？

In the model outlined above, you might also wonder: why not simply focus on the ‘push’ side of education – why bother to understand and adapt to a learner’s concerns? Why not simply use a combination of compelling approaches – enthusiastic teachers, storytelling and simulation, for example – to shape people as required by society?

回答这个问题，当今的教育似乎存在两个主要问题。

In answer to that question, there seem to be two major problems with education today.

首先，人们在学校或大学学到的东西与职场并不相符。这给个人带来了巨大的压力。如前所述，大多数大学毕业生继续从事与其学位无关的领域（最近的一项研究发现，只有约 27% 的美国毕业生在相关领域找到了工作）^。5

First, the things people learn at school or university are not well aligned with the world of work. This creates a tremendous strain on the individual. As previously mentioned, most college graduates go on to work in a field unrelated to their degree (a recent study found only around 27 per cent of US grads found a job in a related field).⁵

这怎么能算是一个有效的系统呢？再说一遍，这本质上是一个“现金换证书”计划，学生证明他们能够遵循指示，因此被认为适合就业（因为“遵循指示”是工业时代的核心能力）。因此，他们几乎所有的学习都将在工作中进行——即通过观察和反复试验等真正的学习机制获得。

How can this be an effective system? Once again, it is in essence a ‘cash for certificates’ scheme in which students demonstrate that they are able to follow instructions, and are therefore deemed fit for employment (since ‘following instructions’ was the core competency in the industrial era). Almost all of their learning will therefore be on the job – i.e. picked up through real learning mechanisms such as observation and trial and error.

这可能还好，如果不是因为他们现在（大部分）被剥夺了培养学习热情的机会，错过了学习那些可能有用的东西的机会。

This might be fine, were it not for the fact that they have now been (for the most part) deprived of the opportunity to develop a passion for learning, and have missed out on the chance to learn the sorts of things that might have been useful.

教育的捍卫者往往是那些在学校表现优秀的人，我的意思是，他们一方面非常擅长记忆信息和通过考试，另一方面又非常乐于服从权威。在他们发展的早期阶段，这种服从相当于“按吩咐做事”；在大学里，这种服从就更复杂了——比如专心听教授讲课，在论文中模仿教授的观点。

The defenders of education tend to be people who did well at school, by which I mean they are on the one hand pretty good at memorizing information and passing tests and on the other quite comfortable with obedience to authority. In the early stages of their development this obedience amounts to ‘doing what you’re told’; during university something more sophisticated – such as listening intently to the professor’s lectures and mimicking their professor’s views in essays.

由于这种奖励和强化制度，他们的自尊心与通过考试和遵守指示密不可分。这可能会让他们在现代职场中感到沮丧和不满足，结果他们转向学术界——成为强调“按要求做”、通过考试的重要性和教育现状捍卫者的那种教师。通过这种和许多其他微妙的方式，教育系统是自我维持的。

As a consequence of this system of rewards and reinforcements, their self-esteem becomes inextricably linked to passing tests and following instructions. This can leave them feeling frustrated and unfulfilled in the modern workplace, with the result that they turn to academia – becoming the kinds of teachers who emphasize ‘doing as you’re told’, the importance of passing tests, and defenders of the educational status quo. In this and many other subtle ways, the educational system is self-sustaining.

即使学位与实践相关，完成转型的人通常也表示，他们在课堂上学到的知识与他们实际需要了解的工作内容关系不大（因此，大约 90% 的学习都是在工作中完成的）^。6

Even where a degree does relate to practice, people who make the transition normally report that what they learned in the classroom bears little relation to what they actually needed to know to do the job (and subsequently around 90 per cent of their learning happens on the job).⁶

值得我们停下来思考一下，当今工作中真正有用的技能是什么。以办公室工作为例，这些技能可能是例如：管理组织政治、融入社会、树立声誉、应对信息过载、撰写电子邮件、参加会议、建立积极的关系。

It’s worth pausing for a second to consider the skills that are actually useful at work today. If we take an office job, for example, they might be things like: managing organizational politics, fitting in, building a reputation, coping with information overload, writing emails, attending meetings, building positive relationships.

如今，许多人大部分时间都花在回复电子邮件和参加会议上。确实如此——几年后情况可能并非如此，但无论发生什么，中世纪历史都不太可能成为一项重要技能。

Today, lots of people spend most of their time answering emails and attending meetings. True – that may not be the case in a few years’ time, but medieval history is unlikely to become a vital skill whatever happens.

大多数人加入组织时，对学习的态度都很厌倦。他们习惯于认为“学习”就是记住一些东西，然后接受测试。反过来，这些测试对他们未来的成功构成了风险。然后，当你说“学习”这个词时，人们就会认为你指的是“教育”。

By the time most people join organizations, they have a jaded attitude towards learning. They have been conditioned to think that ‘learning’ involves memorizing some stuff, which they will later be tested on. In turn these tests present a risk to their future success. It then becomes impossible to say the word ‘learning’ without people thinking you are referring to ‘education’.

鉴于此，改善教育的一个简单方法是：我们问：“为了什么目的？”然后说：“那我们就教这个吧。”例如：

In light of this, a simple way to improve education is as follows: we ask: ‘For what purpose?’, then say, ‘So let’s teach that instead.’ For example:

“孩子们应该学习读写”

‘Children should learn to read and write’

“为了什么目的？”

‘For what purpose?’

“这样他们就可以通过博客表达自己、回复电子邮件和阅读路牌。”

‘So they can express themselves in blogs, respond to emails and read street signs.’

“好的。那我们就教这个吧。”

‘OK. So let’s teach that instead.’

“孩子们应该学习数学。”

‘Children should learn maths.’

“为了什么目的？”

‘For what purpose?’

“这样他们就知道何时在商店收到正确的零钱，从而可以完成纳税申报。”

‘So they know when they receive the correct change in a store, so they can complete their tax returns.’

“好的。那我们就教这个吧。”

‘OK. So let’s teach that instead.’

等等。

And so on.

如果我们想不出目的，那么也许我们就不应该教书。现在有些人可能认为这又是一种狭隘的职业教育观。完全不是。

If we can’t think of a purpose, then perhaps we shouldn’t be teaching something. Now it may seem to some people that this is, once more, a narrowly vocational way to look at education. Not at all.

相反，关键在于，如果教学没有情感意义——如果我们找不到任何人应该关心的理由——那么我们就不应该指望学生学到任何东西。“古典”的捍卫者（例如希腊语或拉丁语等语言）有时会认为这些科目很有教育意义，但也许他们真正的意思是，它们有助于在晚宴上给某类人留下深刻印象。在这种情况下，我们应该教人们如何在晚宴上给某些人留下深刻印象——如果他们对此感兴趣，也许他们也会学习一些荷马诗歌。

Rather, the point is that if there is no affective significance to teaching – if we can’t find a reason why anyone should care – then we shouldn’t expect students to learn anything at all. Defenders of ‘the classics’ (for example languages such as Greek or Latin) will sometimes argue that such subjects are edifying, but perhaps what they really mean is that they are useful for impressing a certain kind of person at dinner parties. In which case we should be teaching people how to impress certain people at dinner parties – and if they are interested in doing that, perhaps they will learn some Homeric poetry too.

但是那些人们不关心但应该关心的事情呢？例如，许多学生可能对填写纳税申报单并不十分感兴趣。我们应该允许人们体验与现实生活相似的挑战，并允许他们做出选择。关键是，当人们关心某件事时，他们就会学到东西，如果他们不关心（或者我们无法引起关心），那么强迫他们这样做就毫无意义。一种关心总是建立在另一种关心之上——这就是为什么当我们想训练动物时，我们会伤害它们或用食物奖励它们。

But what about things that people don’t care about but should? It may well be that many students aren’t terribly interested in completing tax returns, for example. We should permit people to experience challenges that resemble real life and allow them to choose. The point is that people will learn about something when they care about it, and if they don’t care (or we can’t generate care) then there is no point whatsoever in forcing the issue. One care always builds on another – that’s why we hurt animals or reward them with food when we want to train them.

很可能人们在必须填写纳税申报表之前并不太关心纳税申报表——在这种情况下，这正是学习的正确时机。我个人的观点是，我宁愿永远不必学习如何填写纳税申报表。这对我来说似乎从来都不是一项“好玩”的活动。所以，我很乐意付钱让别人来做这种任务——一个喜欢做这件事的人。

Quite possibly people don’t care much about tax returns until they have to complete one – in which case that is the right point to learn. My personal view is that I would rather never have to learn how to complete a tax return. At no point does this seem like it would be a ‘playful’ activity for me. So this is the kind of task that I would happily pay someone else to do – someone who enjoys it.

如果我们创建了一个人们可以自由学习、充满自信的学习系统，那么学习就可以按照需要进行，并由人们面临的挑战和他们关心的事情驱动。

If we have created a system where people are free to learn, and confident learners, then learning can take place as required, driven by the challenges people face and the things that they care about.

如今，绝大多数教育时间和金钱都因未能把握人类学习的这一核心特征而被浪费。无论是在企业学习还是公共教育中，我们都试图让人们记住我们（教育者）认为重要的东西，或者我们的学生在未来某个时候可能会觉得重要的东西，但他们现在并不觉得这些东西那么重要。

Today, the vast majority of educational time and money is wasted through a failure to grasp this central characteristic of human learning. Whether in corporate learning or public education we try to get people to memorize things that we (the educators) think are important, or that our students might feel is important at some time in the future, but which they don’t experience as important themselves, right now.

年轻人通常对未来不太担心，这一事实加剧了这一问题。当他们长大成人时，他们会说：“我希望自己在学校时能更专心学习”，而这对他们来说毫无帮助——他们真正的意思是：“我现在在乎这件事了——我以前并不在乎。”

This problem is compounded by the fact that younger people tend to worry less about the future in general. It helps not a bit when they grow into adults who say things like: ‘I wish I had paid more attention in school’ – what they really mean is: ‘I care about this thing now – I didn’t back then’.

解决办法不是对年轻人进行说教。解决办法要么是让人们按照自己关心的方式学习，要么是找到一种让他们关心的方式。

The solution is not to lecture young people. The solution is either to allow people to learn as they care, or to find a way to make them care.

这就是为什么当某天某位足球明星出现在学校，激发了崇拜他的粉丝对数学的全新敬畏之情时，老师们可能会感到沮丧——这立刻实现了多年来专注教学所无法实现的目标。但其中的原理其实很简单：你所崇拜的偶像关心的事情，你也同样关心。

This is why teachers may experience frustration when, say, a celebrity footballer shows up at school one day and inspires a new-found respect for mathematics in his adoring fans – instantly achieving what years of dedicated instruction could not. But the mechanics are really quite simple: what matters to your heroes matters to you.

我们现行教育体系培养出来的是“严肃”的人，而不是“爱玩”的人。他们身上几乎没有什么轻松愉快的东西。与刚进入这个体系时相比，他们的创造力明显不足^。7

The products of our current educational system are ‘serious’, not ‘playful’ people. There is very little that is light-hearted about them. They are measurably less creative than the people they were when they entered the system.⁷

事实上，成年人的玩乐欲下降可能有生物学基础，如果人们想寻找听话的克隆人来如果员工是维多利亚时代的工厂员工，那么玩乐和创造力几乎不是理想的特征。但在现代经济中，公司和角色变化迅速，越来越多的组织正在寻求创新、独创性和终身学习。

In truth there is probably a biological basis for reduction in playfulness in adult humans, and if one is looking for obedient clones with which to staff a Victorian factory, then playfulness and creativity are hardly desirable characteristics. But in a modern economy companies and roles change rapidly, and many more organizations are looking for innovation, ingenuity and lifelong learning.

我曾亲自设计过文化变革计划，旨在让跨国公司的高管更具“创造力”和“创新精神”，我可以证明，这是一场艰苦的斗争。孩子被埋在很深很深的地方。这些人因服从而被招募，因严肃而被选中，不鼓励他们尝试，却因严厉而受到奖励。而现在，他们白发苍苍，心情沉重，却想玩耍。

I have personally designed culture change programmes aimed at making senior executives in global companies more ‘creative’ and ‘innovative’, and I can testify to the fact that it is an uphill struggle. The child is buried a long way down. These are people who have been recruited for their obedience, selected for their gravity, discouraged from experimentation and rewarded for severity. And now, grey and grave, they want to play.

对于那些希望定期更换角色和发展新技能的人来说，这将带来困难。除非他们能够将这种“玩乐式”的学习模式延续到成年期，否则他们会发现自己与环境格格不入——在 30 多岁时就过时了。

This will cause difficulties for people expecting to change roles and develop new skills on a regular basis. Unless they are able to extend the ‘playful’ mode of learning into adulthood, they will find themselves at odds with their environment – obsolete in their 30s.

停下来想一想，你对“玩”这个词有什么感觉。它是幼稚的吗？你觉得它属于工作场所吗？你能轻易想象有人说：“别玩了，继续工作吧”吗？

Stop and consider for a moment how you feel about the word ‘play’. Is it something childish? Is it something you feel belongs in the workplace? Can you easily imagine someone saying: ‘Stop playing around and get on with your work’?

玩耍很重要，因为在人类中，玩耍代表着“学习模式”，也就是说，它表明你已经进入了一种心理状态，在这种状态下，你对实验和新想法的开放程度得到了增强。在这种模式下，你会感受到心理安全的保护泡沫——我的意思是，你不害怕犯错或尴尬。玩耍时发生的事情不再具有进一步的意义——活动只是为了学习而进行。

Play is important because in humans it denotes ‘learning mode’, i.e. it indicates that you have entered a state of mind where your openness to experimentation and new ideas is enhanced. In this mode you are experiencing a protective bubble of psychological safety – by which I mean you aren’t afraid of making mistakes or of embarrassment. What happens during play is stripped of further significance – activities take place for the sake of learning alone.

如果你制造了一个机器人，上面有一个用于不同模式的按钮，那么进入学习模式的按钮应该叫做“播放”。换句话说，机器人的学习按钮不会让它进入接受状态，即记住听到的所有内容并重复；该模式应该叫做“教育”。

If you built a robot that had a button for different modes, then the button for entering learning mode would be titled ‘play’. In other words, the robot’s learning button wouldn’t cause it to go into a receptive state where it memorizes everything it hears and repeats it back; that mode would be titled ‘education’.

在许多文化中，游戏已经成为一种幼稚、无益、有趣的活动，这一事实表明我们对学习的理解已经严重扭曲。学习应该意味着非常像游戏的东西——而与“教育”完全不同。就像美杜莎一样，教育把我们变成了僵化的成年人；我们既不能学习，也不能游戏。根据经验法则，一个成功的教育环境应该是让学习感觉像游戏的环境——当被问到时，个人会反映这一点。

The fact that for many cultures play has come to signify a childish, unproductive, fun activity reveals just how terribly far our understanding of learning has been corrupted. Learning should mean something very like play – and nothing at all like ‘education’. Like Medusa, education has turned us into ossified adults; as incapable of learning as we are of play. As a rule of thumb, a successful educational environment should be one in which learning feels like play – and where individuals reflect this when asked.

教育的第二个主要问题是：它主要是设计不当的“推动”。很少或根本没有适应学习者的特定热情和关注点。充其量，学生可能会被分流或经历有限的主题的选择，但没有系统的方法来找出他们关心的内容并相应地调整他们的机会。

The second major problem with education is this: it’s mainly ill-designed ‘push’. There is little or no adaptation to the specific passions and concerns of the learner. At best, students may be streamed or experience a limited choice of topics, but there is no systematic approach to finding out what they care about and modifying their opportunities accordingly.

为什么这是个问题？心理学家丹尼尔·莱文森认为，人的一生有一个潜在的结构。8^具体来说，他认为，我们一生中有两个时期会质疑我们的生活结构：‘30 岁过渡期’和‘中年过渡期’。正如莱文森所说，“成年人希望生命在 40 岁开始——但最大的焦虑是它就此结束。” 多么令人沮丧的想法。为什么你的生命应该从 40 岁开始？我们是如何建立起一个从 40 岁开始生命的体系的？

Why is this a problem? The psychologist Daniel Levinson believed that there was an underlying structure to a person’s life.⁸ In particular, he believed that there were two periods in our life when we call into question the structure of our lives: the ‘age 30 transition’ and the ‘mid-life transition’. As Levinson says, ‘Adults hope that life beings at 40 – but the great anxiety is that it ends there’. What a depressing thought. Why should your life begin at 40? How have we managed to build a system where your life begins at 40?

在西方文化中，我们熟悉“中年危机”一词，它与莱文森的中年转型大致相对应，通常是一个令人不安的时期，人们意识到他们或多或少已经完成了到那时为止对他们的期望，而没有停下来考虑什么对他们来说是重要的。

In Western culture we are familiar with the term ‘mid-life crisis’, which broadly corresponds to Levinson’s mid-life transition, and is often an unsettling period where people realize that they have more or less done what is expected of them up to that point, without stopping to consider what matters to them.

故事大致是这样的：当你还是个年轻人时，你的父母和社会会向你强调通过考试的重要性，并经常警告那些没有通过考试的人的命运。出于取悦父母的考虑，在一种基于焦虑的学习体系中，学生们通过了考试，最终获得了一张表明他们适合就业的证书。

The story goes something like this: as a young person, your parents and society impress on you the importance of passing examinations, often with dire warnings about the fate of people who do not. Driven by a concern to please their parents, and within a system of anxiety-based learning, students pass examinations, eventually receiving a certificate that indicates their suitability for employment.

由于没有太多机会探索职业，毕业生通常会接受任何碰巧遇到的工作，因为他们需要履行财务承诺并偿还他们现在积累的巨额债务。然后他们开始学习如何做这份工作，同时应对他们几乎完全没有准备的成人生活的复杂性。

Having not had much opportunity to explore vocations, graduates will often take whatever job happens to come their way, driven by the need to meet their financial commitments and service the considerable debt which they have now amassed. They then begin learning how to do this job, at the same time grappling with the complexities of adult life for which they are almost entirely unprepared.

不知不觉中，他们的孩子就出生了，账单也以惊人的速度增加，而下一次他们反思人生选择的机会就是他们的孩子即将踏上同样的旅程时。他们可能会深深地感觉到他们真正的激情还没有实现，并伴有恐慌感。

Before they know it, they have children and bills multiplying at an alarming rate and the next opportunity they have to reflect on their life choices is when their own children are about to embark on this same journey. They may well experience a deep sense that their true passions have not been realized, accompanied by a feeling of panic.

2011 年，英国国家统计局对 16 至 21 岁的年轻人进行了调查，询问他们成年后想从事什么工作。六年后，当他们再次调查时，只有五十分之一的人从事着他们希望从事的职业^。9

In 2011 the UK’s Office for National Statistics asked a sample of 16-to-21-year-olds what work they would like to do as adults. Six years later, when they checked back, only one in 50 were working in the career that they wished for.⁹

这不是一个好故事。我们系统地将这种叙事铭刻在人们的生活中并不是一件好事。我们必须结束这种现象。很难知道一个允许人们成为他们希望成为的人的制度是否会带来一个更高效的社会，但它不会比一个以这种方式利用人们的社会更糟糕。

This is not a good story. That we are systematically inscribing this narrative into people’s lives is not a good thing. We have to put an end to this. It is hard to know whether a system which allows people to become the person they wish to be will result in a more productive society, but it cannot be a worse society than one in which people are used in this way.

从教育机构到学习型组织

From educational institutions to learning organizations

让我们勾勒出一个好的教育体系是如何运作的。上面描述的两个过程应该体现在两个相互关联的系统中：

Let’s sketch the outline of how a good educational system might work. The two processes described above should be reflected in two interlinked systems:

1. 以持续的方式“绘制”个人关注点的过程。

2. A process in which the concerns of the individual are ‘mapped’ in an ongoing fashion.

3. 个人面临日益复杂的挑战的过程，这些挑战类似于现实世界的环境（即从情感角度来看）。

4. A process in which individuals are exposed to challenges of increasing sophistication, which resemble real-world environments (i.e. from an affective perspective).

我想按顺序解释一下这两件事。

I’d like to explain these two things in order.

当我在家长会上与我最小女儿的老师坐在一起时，她的老师被（教育系统）指示与我分享一张科学的进度表，该表显示了她在一系列读写和算术能力指标方面的进步，并预测了她在将来某个时候可能获得的分数。

When I sit down with my youngest daughter’s teacher at parents evening, her teacher has been instructed (by the education system) to share with me a scientific-looking progress chart which indicates her progress against a number of measures of literacy and numeracy and which projects her likely scores at some time in the future.

我知道整件事都是假的，老师可能也怀疑到这一点，但是我女儿九岁了——她已经很担心考试了——所以只要我们配合，我们就能很好地让我女儿对通过考试感到焦虑。

I know the whole thing is bogus, the teacher may also suspect as much, but my daughter is nine – and she is already worried about tests – so as long as we play along, we are doing a good job of making my daughter feel anxious about passing tests.

如果我问她的老师：“我女儿最关心的五件事是什么？”你认为她的老师会怎么说？一方面，她的老师可能并不特别喜欢她不得不进行的陈旧而刻板的对话——但同样，她可能完全无法确定她的每个学生最关心的五件事。

If I were to ask her teacher: ‘What are the top five things that my daughter cares about?’, what do you think her teacher would say? On the one hand, her teacher probably doesn’t especially enjoy the rather stale and scripted conversations that she is obliged to have – but equally, she would probably be entirely incapable of identifying the top five things that each of her students cares about.

如果情感情境模型是正确的，那么正是我们的关注点推动了我们的学习，因此，负责支持我们学习的人却完全不知道我们的关注点，这让我们感到奇怪。

If the affective context model is correct, then it is our concerns that drive our learning, so it should strike us as odd that someone tasked with supporting our learning is completely unaware of our concerns.

现在你可能觉得我说的话很奇怪，但请考虑一下：Facebook 和 Google 都非常了解你的顾虑。事实上，目前人们正在投入巨资设计系统，利用你的在线活动（比如你的社交媒体活动）来精确地映射你的顾虑，直至最细微的细节。比如周一早上你喜欢喝哪种拿铁。为什么？因为如果我们知道你关心什么，我们就可以预测你会买什么。

Now you may think what I am saying is odd, but consider this: Facebook understands your concerns very well, as does Google. In fact, enormous investments are currently being made into designing systems that use your online activity – such as your social media presence – to accurately map your concerns to the tiniest level of detail. Such as what kind of latte you like to drink on a Monday morning. Why? Because if we know what you care about, we can predict what you will buy.

怎么会这样呢：我们在生活的某个领域开发出了复杂的系统来映射关注点，而在另一个领域却完全忽视了它们呢？

How can it be that we have developed sophisticated systems for mapping concern in one area of life, but completely neglected them in another?

我想说的是，从最基本的层面上讲，教育系统应该有某种方式来映射每个人所关心的全部问题（他们的情感背景）。从最基本的层面上讲，这可能只是一个导师——一个花大量时间了解他们所照顾的每个人的人。但人们希望的远不止这些。

What I am saying is that at a very basic level, an educational system should have some way of mapping the totality of concerns that each individual has (their affective context). At a primitive level this could simply be a mentor – someone who takes considerable time to understand each individual in their care. But one would hope for much more.

理想情况下，我们会看到一个由数字和个人元素组成的综合系统（营销正在构建的那种系统），该系统可以更全面地反映学习者及其进步情况。我说的“进步”绝对不是指考试成绩，而是指他们关注点和热情的变化以及他们不断发展的能力。简而言之，这个系统知道我们是谁，我们在哪里。

Ideally we would see an integrated system (the kind that marketing is building) that comprises digital and personal elements, which provides a much more comprehensive picture of the learner and their progress. And by ‘progress’, I most certainly do not mean test scores – I mean the changing kaleidoscope of their concerns and passions and their developing capabilities. In short, a system that knows who we are, and where we are.

我认为，当今教育界最优秀的教师都是那些花时间了解学生关心的事情，并让教学内容与他们关心的事情相关的人，这种说法并不会引起争议。但令人遗憾的是，我们既没有认识到这项活动的核心意义，也没有在教学过程中建立任何复杂性。这只是一种“锦上添花”的做法。

I don’t think it is controversial to suggest that some of the best teachers that we have working in education today are those who take the time to understand what matters to their students, and to make the material relevant to the things they care about. The great shame is that we have neither recognized the central significance of this activity, nor built any sophistication whatsoever into how it is carried out. It’s just a ‘nice to have’.

想象一下这样一个世界：你九岁的孩子对辩论的热爱得到了培养，发展成为对法律案件的兴趣，现在他们正准备在一个简单的法律模拟中为自己的客户辩护。这不是一个狭隘的职业议程；而是将一方（个人）的关切与另一方（社会）的关切相匹配，让双方都感到满意。

Picture a world in which your nine-year-old child’s enjoyment of debates has been nurtured, developed into an interest in legal cases, and they are now preparing to defend their client in a simple legal simulation. This is not a narrowly vocational agenda; instead it is about matching the concerns of one party (the individual) with the concerns of another (society), in such a way that both are happy.

我上面概述的第二个过程是让人们面对日益复杂的挑战。这里的目的是将学习和工作无缝地结合起来。我的意思是，一方面，一个人纯粹在学习，不做任何实际工作（并且可能为这种经历付费），而另一方面，一个人工作、教学和学习很少（并且可能从这种经历中赚钱）。

The second process that I have outlined above is exposing people to challenges of increasing sophistication. The aim here is to blend learning and work seamlessly. By this I mean that at one end of the scale, an individual is purely learning and not undertaking any actual work (and may be paying for this experience), and at the other end is working, teaching and learning very little (and may be earning from this experience).

举个例子，语言翻译。刚开始的时候，当一个人对一门新语言知之甚少时，他们只是在学习，无法做任何实际的翻译工作。随着他们熟练程度的提高，他们面临的翻译问题变得越来越复杂，并且会根据他们的熟练程度开始从他们所做的翻译工作中赚钱。

An example might be language translation. At the very beginning, when a person knows very little of a new language, they are learning and not capable of doing any actual translation work. As they grow in proficiency, they are presented with translation problems of increasing complexity and will start to earn money from the translation work they are doing, depending on their level of proficiency.

该模型有一些值得指出的重要特点：

There are some important features of this model worth pointing out:

• 它不会在某个年龄开始或结束。相反，它会贯穿人的一生。当人们谈论“终身学习”时，要确保他们不是在谈论“终身教育”。终身教育更经常有人讨论高等教育机构如何通过向老年人出售证书来赚更多的钱。终身学习是关于如何在人生的任何时候面对各种各样的挑战。今天，我们最接近这一点的东西是电脑游戏机：在我生命中的任何时刻，我都可以购买飞行模拟器游戏并磨练我的技能。游戏将记录我的成就。

• It doesn’t start or stop at a given age. Instead it carries on throughout a person’s lifetime. When people talk about ‘lifelong learning’, check that they aren’t talking about ‘lifelong education’. Lifelong education is more often than not a discussion about how higher education institutions can make more money by selling certificates to older people. Lifelong learning is about how you can be exposed to a wide variety of challenges at any time in your life. Today the closest thing we have to this is computer gaming consoles: at any point in my life I can purchase a flight simulator game and hone my skills. The game will track my accomplishments.

• 学习机构并不是一个让你远离工作世界的“地方”。相反，教育系统就像遍布全身的血管一样遍布我们的环境。我想象会有物理和数字空间，让你体验工作模拟，以及在工作中以支持的方式练习的地方。我们应该能够让学习变得更加容易获得，并且不那么排他。我们目前的教育体系继续歧视来自低收入阶层的有能力的个人。

• Learning institutions are not a ‘place’ that you go to, where you are separated from the world of work. Instead, the education system is distributed throughout our environment like veins throughout the body. I imagine there will be both physical and digital spaces that you can experience simulations of work, and places within work where you can practise in a supported way. We should be able to make learning far more accessible and far less exclusive. Our current education system continues to discriminate against capable individuals from a lower income bracket.

• 一个人可能会拥有一系列学习领域——他们可能非常精通网络攻击（并从中赚钱），但烹饪却远不及他们（并从中赚钱）。在瞬息万变的就业市场中，学习组合可能是一种很好的策略，也有助于防止晚年智力衰退。

• An individual will likely have a portfolio of areas of learning – they may be highly proficient in, say, cyber-attacks (and earn money from this activity), and far less proficient in cookery (and pay for this activity). It is likely that a learning portfolio is a good strategy in a fast-moving employment market, and also helps protect against mental decline in later life.

• 学习者可以随时改变方向。虽然关注点映射过程会提出探索领域，但他们可以自由探索任何学习领域。

• The learner can change direction at any time. Whilst the concern-mapping process suggests areas for exploration, they are free to explore any area of learning.

• 学习不是按主题组织的，而是按挑战类别组织的。这些挑战类别在较低级别（例如人际关系）上更为普遍，但在较高水平（外交或政治）上则变得更加具体。绘制出关注的“系统发生”是教育科学化道路上的一大步。虽然现在很难想象这一点，但将其想象成流行流媒体服务制作的音乐流派地图可能会有所帮助。这些地图让提供商可以自信地预测：“如果你喜欢这个和这个……你可能会喜欢这个。”

• Learning is not organized by topic, but by classes of challenge. These classes of challenge are more general at the lower levels (e.g. relationships), but become more specific at higher levels of proficiency (diplomacy or politics). Mapping out the ‘phylogeny’ of concern is a big step on the road to making education scientific. Though it’s hard to envisage this now, it might be helpful to think of it a bit like the maps of musical genres produced by popular streaming services. These maps allow the provider to confidently predict: ‘If you liked this and this… you might like this.’

• 当一个人成功完成挑战时，他们会获得反映其成就的徽章。这些徽章告诉其他人，比如雇主，这个人能做什么，并构成其个人资料的一部分。当前的教育体系是一个泡沫，其破灭完全由与雇主的默契所阻止。只要雇主继续相信学位是未来工作成功的良好预测因素，那么教育泡沫就完好无损。但是，越来越多的人事实并非如此。没有太多证据支持这种联系，学术机构为建立这种联系付出了很大努力，而且很大程度上，这种关系的存在只是因为缺乏替代方案。一个简单的徽章系统，具有经过验证的预测能力，会让整个系统崩溃。

• As a person successfully completes challenges they earn badges that reflect their accomplishments. These badges tell other people, such as employers, what that individual can do and form part of their personal profile. The current education system is a bubble whose bursting is entirely prevented by a tacit agreement with employers. So long as employers continue to buy the idea that a degree is a good predictor of future job success, then the education bubble is intact. But, increasingly, they don’t. There isn’t much evidence to support the link, much effort on the part of academic institutions to establish a link, and in large part the relationship is only there due to a lack of alternatives. A simple badging system, with proven predictive power, would send the whole system tumbling.

• 话题围绕挑战展开，而不是成为关注的焦点。例如，一个热衷于减轻发展中国家债务的人可能会按要求学习国际法、经济学、农业、历史和人类学等内容。

• Topics are drawn in around the challenges rather than being the focus of attention. So, for example, a person who is passionate about alleviating developing world debt might study elements of international law, economics, agriculture, history and anthropology as required.

• 真实与模拟、虚拟与物理的挑战在学习过程中相互交织。从某种意义上说，工作与娱乐也相互交织（因此，工作与生活的平衡挑战基本消失）。

• Real and simulated, virtual and physical challenges are blended across the learning gradient. In an important sense, work and play are also blended (with the result that the challenge of work–life balance largely disappears).

• 该系统本质上是精英管理的：人们的报酬取决于他们所做的工作和他们帮助他人发展的价值。这意味着年轻人很容易比老年人赚得更多。今天，我们的等级制度模式倾向于以更高的薪水奖励老年人，即使他们的能力下降，这种方式会积极地阻碍我们随着年龄的增长而学习。我们提出的模式更有可能鼓励有经验的人通过培养他人来赚取收入。

• The system is inherently meritocratic: people are paid according to the value of their contributions, in terms of the work they do and the help they give others to develop. This means that a younger person can easily earn more than an older person. Today, our hierarchical model tends to reward older people with higher salaries even as their capability declines, in a way that actively discourages learning the older we get. Our proposed model would more likely encourage experienced people to make an income through developing others.

让我们想象一下这在实践中如何发挥作用。

Let’s imagine how this might work in practice.

总体而言，教育应该呈梯度递增，在刚开始时，当一个人的关注点尚未集中时，有更多的机会玩耍、探索和体验。随着个人开始发展自己的能力，挑战应该变得更加复杂，可用的资源也应该随之增加。然而，在整个梯度中，学习是由挑战驱动的，随着挑战的复杂性增加，挑战自然会融入工作中。

Overall, education should average out as a gradient with more opportunities to play, explore and experience at the outset, when a person’s concerns have yet to come into focus. As the individual begins to develop their capability, the challenges should increase in sophistication, and the available resources to match. However, across the gradient learning is driven by challenges which, as they increase in complexity, merge naturally into work.

这种模式引发的一个问题是如何组织早期教育。具体来说，应该制定什么样的课程，因为让孩子接触所有可以想象到的角色类型是不切实际的，而且我们希望避免出现如今课程中那种拼凑在一起的情况。

One question begged by this model is how to organize early education. Specifically, what kind of curriculum to put in place, since it is impractical to expose children to every conceivable type of role and we want to avoid the kind of patchwork that comprises the curriculum we have today.

个体差异和徽章的作用

Individual differences and the role of badges

当孩子们进入这个系统时，应该对他们的担忧进行彻底而全面的分析：这可能包括对孩子和父母的采访、观察和对与历史活动相关的数据的分析。更重要的是，应该把他们带入一个他们可以探索挑战和环境的世界，这些挑战和环境反映了上述环境类型。

As children enter the system there should be a thorough and comprehensive analysis of their concerns: this might include interviews with the child, with the parents, observations and an analysis of data relating to historical activity. More importantly, they should be introduced into a world where they can explore challenges and environments reflecting the sorts of environments outlined above.

作为一般原则，无论哪里有挑战需要解决，哪里有环境需要掌控，哪里就应该有水平高得多的人的能力，以便个人不仅可以通过游戏学习，还可以通过观察学习。10^儿童应该自由地在这些不同的环境中漫游，并由有人定期观察并就他们的反应和发现与他们交谈。

As a general principle, wherever there is a challenge to be tackled or an environment to master, there should be people of a significantly higher level of capability present, so that individuals can learn not only through play but through observation.¹⁰ Children should be free to roam these different environments, supported by someone who regularly observes and engages them in conversation regarding their reactions and discoveries.

这一制度意味着，教师和其他职业一样，将消失。从事教学的人都是经验丰富的人，他们选择以这种方式赚取至少一部分收入。这并不是说教学本身将被淘汰，而是人们想象所有工作都将走向这一方向，即它们将被分解成各个组成部分的任务，由有能力的人来接手^。11

The implication of this system is that teaching, in line with other professions, vanishes. The people who teach are the people with experience who chose to earn at least some of their income this way. It is not that teaching itself is singled out for elimination, rather one imagines all jobs will go this way, i.e. they will be broken up into their component tasks to be picked up by the people with the capability to do them.¹¹

在工业时代，通过将工匠的工作分解为不同的角色，实现了“生产线”，取得了进步。在下一个发展阶段，角色被分解为其组成任务，以分布式方式进行。您可能很快就会想到这种模式的优缺点：一方面，它将在很大程度上消除教师不知道如何在现实世界中完成任务的问题。

In the industrial era, progress was made by breaking the work of a craftsman into distinct roles, enabling the ‘production line’. In the next progression, a role is broken into its component tasks, to be undertaken in a distributed manner. You might quickly imagine pros and cons of this model: on the one hand it would largely eradicate the problem of teachers not really knowing how to do tasks in the real world.

如今，教育与火星系统有些相似，主要存在于一种泡沫之中，人们并不期望教育与工作直接相关。因此，学术界即使不暗中鼓励，也容忍与世界脱节。

Today – a bit like our Martian system – education mainly exists in a kind of bubble in which it is not actually expected to interface directly with work. As a result, being out of touch with the world is tolerated if not tacitly encouraged among academics.

另一方面，你可能会担心擅长做某事的人是否擅长支持别人学习如何做这件事——也许你的担心是对的。

On the other hand, you might worry about whether people who are good at doing something would be good at supporting others to learn how to do it – and probably you are right to worry.

但是，让我们首先消除这样的误解：教师资格证书能让你擅长支持学习者；事实并非如此。像大多数资格证书一样，大量的内容堆积在你身上实际上对要完成的工作没有多大帮助。大多数老师会告诉你，你在教学课程中学到的东西与你在课堂上面临的挑战没有太大关系。

But let’s start by dispelling the myth that a teaching qualification makes you good at supporting learners; it doesn’t. Like most qualifications, having a load of content dumped on you doesn’t actually help much with the job to be done. Most teachers will tell you that the stuff you learn on a teaching programme doesn’t bear much relation to the challenges you face in a classroom.

在我们的模型中，人们会边做边学。如果他们培养了支持学习的能力，这将反映在他们获得的徽章上。因此，对计算机科学感兴趣的人可能会选择一位导师，他不仅拥有令人印象深刻的成就，而且还因其支持的质量而获得徽章。当然，对于那些希望培养支持学习能力的人来说，我们会提供资源。

In our model, people will learn by doing. If they develop the ability to support learning, it will be reflected in the badges they earn. People interested in computer science may therefore choose a mentor who not only has impressive accomplishments, but badges for the quality of their support. Of course there will be resources available to people who wish to develop their ability to support learning.

再次重申，我所描述的是一个分层挑战系统，在这种环境中，大多数时候，人们既在学习，也在工作，既在付出，也在赚钱，既在教导他人，也在自我学习。事实上，这与我们几千年来的学习方式并无二致。

Once again, what I am describing is a system of tiered challenges, an environment where at most points one is simultaneously learning and working, paying and earning, teaching others and being taught oneself. Not unlike the way we have learned for millennia, in fact.

一旦一种模式开始出现——不一定是一个人擅长什么的模式，而是一个人关注的模式——那么就应该有可能开始引导这一过程，提出进一步探索的领域。这一点很重要——引导孩子发展的不是孩子的能力，而是他们的关注点。如果我们只是关注人们擅长的东西（但不关心），那么学习很可能会效率低下，个人也会很痛苦。

Once a pattern begins to emerge – not necessarily a pattern of what a person is good at but a pattern of their concerns – then it should be possible to begin to steer the process, suggesting areas for further exploration. This point is important – it is not a child’s capabilities but their concerns that steer their development. If we were simply to focus on what people are good at (but don’t care about), there is a good chance that learning will be inefficient and the individual miserable.

在这个模型中，没有什么可以阻止孩子过早地专攻——例如，在 12 岁时迅速攀升挑战复杂性的行列，成为一名成就卓著、收入丰厚的网络攻击者（或商业无人机飞行员）。同样，孩子们可以继续探索——事实上，成人学习者可能在某些领域很有成就，但在其他领域却相对陌生。

In this model there is nothing to stop a child specializing early – for example, quickly climbing the ranks of challenge complexity to become an accomplished and high-earning cyber-attacker at the age of 12 (or a commercial drone pilot). Equally, children can continue to explore – indeed, adult learners may well be accomplished in some areas but relative novices in others.

再次，学习和工作之间没有明确的区分；相反，每个人都有一套反映他们成就的徽章和一系列活动，其中他们的能力范围从新手（学习）到专家（工作）。

Once again, there is no sharp distinction between learning and work; instead each person has a set of badges reflecting their accomplishments and a portfolio of activities where their capability ranges from novice (learning) to expert (working).

用徽章来体现我们的成就这一理念也与教育正统观念大相径庭，在教育正统观念中，我们通过考试获得证书。相比之下，徽章更多地是关于你能做什么，而不是你知道什么。这对所有相关人员来说都是一个更好的系统；正在考虑是否付钱给你做某事的人可以立即评估你的能力水平和任务适应性。事实上，使用一种算法来自动识别有能力、可以完成某项任务的人是有意义的。

The idea of badges that reflect our accomplishments is also a significant departure from educational orthodoxy in which we earn certificates for the tests we have passed. By contrast badges are very much more about what you can do, rather than what you know. This is a much better system for all concerned; someone who is considering whether or not to pay you to do something can immediately assess your level of capability and task fit. Indeed, it would make sense to do this using an algorithm which automatically identifies the capable, available people for a task.

每个人都会拥有一系列任务，从中赚取收入，这些任务与他们在一系列兴趣方面的能力水平相匹配。从个人的角度来看——在决定是否接受一项工作时，一个关键的考虑因素是学习新技能的机会。企业将受到激励，提供提供学习机会的任务。

Each individual would have a portfolio of tasks from which they earn an income, matched to their level of capability across a range of interests. And consider it from the perspective of the individual – in deciding whether or not to take on a piece of work, a key consideration will be the opportunity to learn new badges. Businesses will be incentivized to provide assignments that provide opportunities to learn.

徽章系统需要可移植的个人资料。目前，你的成就和学习记录通常由你工作过的组织保存。随着人们从一个组织转移到另一个组织的速度越来越快，这个问题变得越来越严重。

A system of badges would require a portable profile. Currently a record of your achievements and learning is often held by the organizations for whom you have worked. This is becoming increasingly problematic as people move from one organization to another with increasing rapidity.

组织要么需要自行配置以提供各种各样的短期任务，要么接受更“即插即用”的资源配置方法。在这个世界中，个人将拥有并维护自己的成就记录，这将是他们成就的核心、可见记录和能力证据。事实上，这已经开始发生；LinkedIn 等网站为人才和招聘提供了统一的市场。

Organizations will either need to configure themselves to offer a wide variety of short-term assignments, or accept a more ‘plug and play’ approach to resourcing. In this world an individual will own and maintain their own record of achievements, which will be a central, visible record of their accomplishments and evidence of their capability. In fact, this is already starting to take place; sites such as LinkedIn providing a unified marketplace for talent and recruitment.

这里缺少的是我们所描述的职业发展“树状结构”以及认证机构。例如，我可以记录自己在财富 100 强公司内“成功领导”了一定规模的团队，但这就像记录自己“成功完成”了一款电脑游戏一样——它根本不能说明我的具体成就。一套合适的徽章系统可以识别出非常具体的成就，并可以可靠地衡量我的成功。这很可能需要其他可信人士的评级。

What is missing here is the ‘tree structure’ of vocational development that we have described, together with an accrediting authority. I can record, for example, that I have ‘successfully led’ teams of a certain size within a Fortune 100 company, but this is like recording that I have ‘successfully completed’ a computer game – it doesn’t say very much at all about my specific accomplishments. A proper system of badges would identify very specific achievements and a credible measure of my success. This could well involve ratings by other, credible, people.

挑战的本质意味着，主题和能力会对任务的引力做出反应——掌握计算机可能涉及学习书写文字和使用数字，但只能以与学习者关注点相关的方式进行。这并不是说不再教授地理和历史等，只是以与某人正在尝试做的事情相关的方式教授它们。

The nature of challenges means that topics and capabilities respond to the gravitational pull of the task – mastery of computers might well involve learning to write script and to use numbers, but only in ways that relate to the learner’s concerns. It is not that geography and history and so on are no longer taught, it is just that they are taught in a way which is relevant, which relates to the thing that someone is trying to do.

总体而言，该系统的结构类似于一棵树，底部有几个分支，随着挑战变得更加具体和复杂，每个分支都会不断分叉。人们可以随着展示自己的能力并获得成就徽章而向上推进，但他们也可以沿着结构向下移动并探索其他分支。

Overall, the structure of the system resembles something like a tree, with a few branches at the base, each of which divides again and again as challenges become more specific and complex. People can advance up the structure as they demonstrate capability and earn badges for their accomplishments, but they can equally move back down the structure and explore other branches.

该系统不是围绕内容和课程而建立的，而是围绕挑战和关注点而建立的——围绕人们关心的事情，因为这些都反映在工作世界中。这是因为学习是情感性的。

The system is organized not around content and curricula, but challenges and concerns – around the things people care about, as these are reflected in the world of work. And this, because learning is affective.

我上面所概述的内容与自由市场的教育方法一致，其中工作和学习在任务层面上被原子化，并且为两者创建了一个混合的市场，在这个市场中个人可以平衡他们从工作中获得的收入和他们为学习所支付的费用。

What I have outlined above is consistent with a free-market approach to education, where work and learning are atomized at the level of tasks, and a blended marketplace for both created in which an individual can balance what they earn from work with what they pay to learn.

然而，自由市场思维并不总是能在其他领域实现我们所希望的乌托邦，那么如何才能阻止它沦为某种可怕的赚钱计划呢？

Free-market thinking has not always delivered the utopia we might have wished for in other areas, however, so what is to stop this descending into some dreadful money-making scheme?

我认为，如果公共机构要防止出现某种劳动力市场敲诈勒索行为，就应该严格控制徽章和认证制度。通过确保成就的共同标准和评估方式，他们可以降低“用徽章换现金”经济取代我们今天的“用证书换现金”经济的风险。

In my view, public bodies should retain tight control over the system of badges and accreditation if they are to prevent the emergence of a kind of labour-market racketeering. By ensuring a common standard for accomplishments and the way in which these are assessed they can reduce the risk of a ‘cash for badges’ economy emerging to replace the ‘cash for certificates’ one that we have today.

然而，就在我写这篇文章的时候，LinkedIn 等私营部门组织正在悄悄地整合一份中央成就记录的组成部分，这应该引起我们的关注，因为我已经可以通过付费让自己在潜在雇主面前更加引人注目。

Even as I write, though, private sector organizations such as LinkedIn are quietly assembling the component parts of a central record of accomplishments, and this should concern us, since it is already possible for me to pay to make myself more visible to potential employers.

我想通过定义教育的目的来结束本章：

I’d like to end this chapter by defining the purpose of education:

教育应该通过提供一个过程来支持学习，使个人发现目标感，并使其成为工作生活的一部分。

Education should support learning by providing a process that allows individuals to discover a sense of purpose, and to make it part of their working life.

在下一章中，我将讨论语言。语言是思考学习的核心，因为人类的很多学习都是通过语言进行的：我们阅读的东西、人们讲述的故事、人们消费的内容。如果我们理解语言，我们就可以更有效地使用它。

In the next chapter I will talk about language. Language is central to thinking about learning because so much human learning takes place via language: the things that we read, the stories that people tell, the content people consume. If we understood language, we could use it more effectively.

“使用相同的词语并不足以确保理解；人们必须使用相同的词语来表达同一类内在体验；最终人们必须拥有共同的经历。”

‘To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one’s experiences in common.’

弗里德里希·尼采

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

20 世纪 50 年代，第二次世界大战结束后，人们热切地期待着机器人的到来。战争推动了科学的巨大进步，最初为密码破译而发明的首批计算机进入了大众的视野。艾萨克·阿西莫夫的“机器人三定律”出现在他的短篇小说集《我，机器人》中，而罗比机器人则在 1956 年的科幻电影《禁忌星球》中登上了大银幕。

Back in the 1950s, following the Second World War, people were eagerly awaiting their robots. The war effort had spurred huge advances in science and the first computers, initially created for code-breaking, entered popular consciousness. Isaac Asimov’s ‘Three Laws of Robotics’ appeared in his collection of short stories I, Robot, and Robbie the Robot strutted onto the cinema screen in the 1956 science fiction film Forbidden Planet.

1967 年的《星际迷航》系列剧集《明天是昨天》中，出现了一台“女性”计算机，以及以下令人愉快的对话：

The 1967 episode of Star Trek entitled ‘Tomorrow is Yesterday’ featured a ‘female’ computer, and the following delightful dialogue:

柯克船长：工程官斯科特告知曲速引擎受损，但可以恢复运行并重新通电。

Captain Kirk: Engineering officer Scott informs warp engines damaged, but can be made operational and re-energized.

船上的计算机：已计算并记录，亲爱的。

Ship’s computer: Computed and recorded, dear.

柯克船长：计算机，你不能用那种方式称呼我。计算机。

Captain Kirk: Computer, you will not address me in that manner. Compute.

船上的计算机：计算完毕，亲爱的。

Ship’s computer: Computed, dear.

柯克船长：史波克先生，我命令修复这台计算机及其互连系统！

Captain Kirk: Mr Spock, I ordered this computer and its interlinking systems repaired!

史波克先生：我已经调查过了，船长。要纠正这个错误需要彻底检修整个计算机系统。在星际基地至少要花三个星期。

Mr Spock: I have investigated it, Captain. To correct the fault will require an overhaul of the entire computer system. A minimum of three weeks at a star base.

柯克船长：我不会太介意，只要它不要变得如此……亲热。

Captain Kirk: I wouldn’t mind so much, if only it didn’t get so… affectionate.

斯波克先生：不幸的是，它还有咯咯笑的习惯。

Mr Spock: It also has an unfortunate tendency to giggle.

大副：我认为女士电脑不是例行公事吗？

First officer: I take it that a lady computer is not routine?

还有什么比一台有感情的电脑更糟糕吗？我们最好尽快解决这个问题。不管是否感性，对消费者来说，机器人管家加入到我们的电视和微波炉等日常家用电器中似乎只是时间问题。

Could there be anything worse than an affectionate computer? We had better fix that fault pretty soon. Sentimental or not, it seemed obvious to consumers that it was only a matter of time before a robot butler would be added to our TV and microwave as an everyday household appliance.

不只是我们这些头脑简单的消费者有这样的想法：人工智能研究人员自信地预测人工智能将迅速发展。1968 年电影《2001：太空漫游》的技术顾问马文·明斯基认为 HAL 9000 的人工智能功能是保守估计。

It wasn’t just us simple-minded consumers who were thinking along these lines: artificial intelligence researchers confidently predicted swift progress. Marvin Minsky, a technical advisor for the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, judged the AI features of HAL 9000 to be a conservative estimate.

那么...我的机器人在哪里？

So… where’s my robot?

事实证明，这比任何人想象的都要难一些。计算机就是“不明白”。以机器翻译为例，短语“心有余而力不足”在俄语中会变成“伏特加很好，但肉烂了”。还有其他同样糟糕的事情。

It turned out to be a bit harder than anyone thought. Computers just didn’t ‘get it’. To take an example from machine translation, the phrase: ‘The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’ would become: ‘The vodka is good but the meat is rotten’ in Russian. And there were other things just as bad.

计算机科学家曾假设人们说话时是用单词，每个单词都有一种声音，可以训练计算机识别——然而，当他们尝试这样做时，他们发现人们说话时通常都是以一种相当连续的噪音模式，其中的停顿甚至与单词之间的停顿并不完全对应。更糟糕的是，同一个单词在不同的人——甚至是同一个人的嘴里——根据上下文的不同，听起来可能会有很大的不同。在技术术语中，没有“不变的特征”。

Computer scientists had assumed that people speak in words, and that each word has a sound that you could train a computer to recognize – only, when they tried to do this, they discovered that people usually speak in a fairly unbroken pattern of noises, where the breaks don’t even correspond neatly to the breaks between words. Worse still, the same word may sound very different in the mouths of different people – or even the same person – depending on the context. In the technical jargon there were no ‘invariant features’.

这就是为什么，即使在今天，我们仍然很难让 Siri 或 Alexa 理解我们，即使我们说话声音听起来很清晰。我经常躺在床上，对我的智能助手尖叫“Alexa！卧室。灯。关！”。我不知道邻居们怎么想。

This is why, even today, we often struggle to get Siri or Alexa to understand us, even when speaking with artificial clarity. I routinely lie in bed, shrieking ‘Alexa! Bedroom. Light. Off!’ to my intelligent assistant. I have no idea what the neighbours think.

视力更差。事实证明，计算机无法根据外表识别物体——它们必须知道这些物体到底是什么。我的意思是：我们可能认为我们可以将一张猫的图片输入计算机并说“这是一只猫”，但实际上猫的图片只是光影的图案——在某些情况下，类似的图案可能不是猫，而在其他情况下，非常不同的图案实际上可能是……一只猫。

Vision was worse. It turned out that computers couldn’t recognize objects from what they looked like – they had to know what those objects really were. What I mean is this: we might think that we can feed a picture of a cat to a computer and say ‘This is a cat’, but actually the cat picture is just a pattern of light and shade – in some contexts a similar pattern may not be a cat, and in others a very different pattern may actually be… a cat.

这一切都有一种奇怪的循环性——你必须知道你在看什么才能知道它是什么。视觉和声音都是关于背景的——你不可能只注意到一个小元素而不发现它与一个人所学的一切有关。计算机唯一能做好的事情就是大多数人做得非常差的事情——逻辑性的事情，比如寻找大素数，或者下象棋。

There was a strange circularity to it all – you had to sort of know what you were looking at to know what it is. Sights and sounds were all about context – you couldn’t pick up one small element without discovering it was attached to everything else that a person had learned. The only things computers could do well were the things most people did terribly poorly – logical things, like finding big prime numbers, or chess.

因此，期待结果的人们变得非常失望，投资枯竭，人们创造了“人工智能寒冬”这个表达来描述我们对科学家的深深失望以及人工智能项目相应的资金匮乏。

So people expecting results got very disappointed, investment dried up, and the expression ‘AI winter’ was coined to describe our deep disappointment in the boffins and the corresponding lack of cash for AI projects.

简单来说，我们进入人工智能寒冬的原因是，我们认为自己了解自己，因此错误地认为让计算机做我们做的事情很容易。但实际上，我们不知道人类是如何工作的，我们通过让计算机以我们认为人类处理事物的方式处理事物，并发现结果与我们预期的完全不同，这让我们付出了惨痛的代价。从某种意义上说，应该怪罪的是那些带着笛卡尔思想的哲学家和心理学家，而不是科学家。

Put simply, the reason we entered AI winter is that we thought that we understood ourselves, so we incorrectly assumed it would be easy to get computers to do what we do. But we actually had no idea how humans work, and we found this out the hard way by getting computers to process stuff the way we thought humans were processing stuff – and discovering that didn’t have anything like the results we were expecting. In a sense the philosophers and psychologists with their Cartesian baggage, not the boffins, were to blame.

语言处理是目前最难解决的问题之一，也是我们至今无法解决的问题。在人工智能发展的早期，人们的推理是这样的：“语言是由单词组成的。单词有定义。如果我们给计算机输入一本词典和一些语法知识，它就能理解语言。”

One of the more intractable problems – a problem that we are still unable to solve – is language processing. In the early days of AI the reasoning went something like this: ‘Language is made up of words. Words have definitions. If we feed the computer a dictionary and some stuff on grammar, it will be able to understand language.’

诺姆·乔姆斯基等理论家助长了这种错觉。乔姆斯基是一位理性主义者，是众多因错误假设而注定失败的聪明人之一。他主张存在一种遵循一套共同规则的通用语法，并主张大脑中存在一种以某种方式包含这些规则的“语言习得装置”。

Theorists such as Noam Chomsky fed this delusion. Chomsky was a rationalist, one of a great many smart people doomed to failure by erroneous assumptions. He argued for the existence of a universal grammar that followed a common set of rules, and for a ‘Language Acquisition Device’ in the brain that somehow contained these rules.

这是一个好主意；如果它是真的，那么就有可能发现这些规则，将它们转录为计算机算法并将其输入到 Amstrad 64 中。

It was a nice idea; if it were true, then it might be possible to discover these rules, transcribe them as a computer algorithm and type it into the Amstrad 64.

这是一次惊人的失败。不仅人们的语言使用顽固地拒绝遵守规则，而且无论我们向计算机输入多少信息，它们都无法理解我们在说什么。

It was a spectacular failure. Not only did people’s use of language stubbornly refuse to conform to rules, somehow no matter how much information we fed the computers they couldn’t understand what we were talking about.

今天依然如此。在我写这篇文章时，《连线》杂志称：“GPT-3（一种新型人工智能程序）正在学习我们的语言。”但事实并非如此，原因与你的影子没有学习跳舞一样。像所有人工智能程序一样，它只是对人类所说的话的统计近似——非常好——但最终是数十亿人在网上分享情绪所投射的影子。

This is still true today. As I write, Wired magazine states: ‘GPT-3 [a new type of AI programme] is learning our language.’ But it is not, for the same reason that your shadow is not learning to dance. Like all AI programmes, it is merely a statistical approximation to what a human being would say – a very good one – but ultimately a shadow cast by billions of people sharing their sentiments online.

随着技术越来越先进，它可以更好地猜测人类会说什么——但它永远无法理解人们所说的内容。创造越来越接近人们所说内容的过程并不能最终理解人们所说的内容，就像创造更好的录音的过程并不能产生歌手一样。

As the technology gets better and better, it can make better guesses at what a human would say – but at no point does it understand what is being said. The process of creating better and better approximations to what people say does not culminate in understanding, just as the process of creating better sound recordings does not result in a singer.

2015 年，一篇文章声称 IBM 的人工智能系统 Watson 可以阅读和理解鲍勃·迪伦的歌词。1但计算机声称理解的内容（迪伦谈论的是“爱情消逝”）并不是迪伦真正唱的内容。迪伦唱的^是其他东西，比如越南战争。但 Watson 不明白这一点，因为 Watson 本质上只是在计算单词数量，并将出现频率较高的单词加起来。人类根本不会使用这样的单词^。2

In 2015, an article claimed that IBM’s AI system – Watson – could read and understand Bob Dylan lyrics.¹ But what the computer claimed to understand (that Dylan was talking about ‘love fading’) was not what Dylan was actually singing about. Dylan was singing about other things – like the war in Vietnam. But Watson didn’t understand this because Watson was, in essence, just counting the words and adding up the ones that occurred more frequently. Human beings don’t use words like this at all.²

那么人类如何使用语言，以及这为什么重要？

So how do human beings use words, and why is this important?

我想谈谈你的感受。我想让你回想一下一段感情破裂的情形——如果可能的话，回想一下你爱上某人，然后发生了一些事情，你们分道扬镳的情形。如果你经历过这种情况，那么你可能仍然知道那种感觉有多糟糕。

I’d like to talk about how you feel. I’d like you to think back to a relationship break-up – if possible, to a time when you were in love with someone, then something happened and you went your separate ways. If you have experienced this, then you will probably still know how awful that can feel.

当关系破裂时，其他人会用“心烦意乱”这样的词来描述你的感受。但对你来说，“心烦意乱”这样的词可能不能充分表达你的感受。你的感受更像是一场飓风——撕裂一切，摧毁你的生活，折磨你的内心。“心烦意乱”还不足以形容它。

When relationships fall apart, other people use words like ‘upset’ to describe the way you are feeling. But to you, words like ‘upset’ probably don’t do your feelings justice. What you feel is more like a hurricane – ripping things up, tearing through your life, wrenching at your insides. ‘Upset’ doesn’t begin to cover it.

当谈论我们的情绪时，有时我们似乎缺乏词语来充分描述我们的感受；用来描述我们感受的词语范围——快乐、悲伤、愤怒——太少了。

When talking about our emotions, it sometimes seems that we lack the words to adequately describe how we feel; that the range of words to describe our feelings – happy, sad, angry – is just too small.

但我想告诉你们，我们用来描述我们感受的词语比你们想象的要多得多。让我给你们介绍几个。第一个是“家”。

But I’d like to show you that we have many more words to describe our feelings than you imagined. Let me introduce you to a few. Here’s the first one: ‘home’.

现在，您可能会认为“家”这个词描述的是一栋建筑，而不是您的感受，但请听我说完。想象一下尝试为计算机定义“家”。您可能会画出一所房子的图画，或不同类型的房子的图画。一个小孩子可能会向您展示蜗牛壳的图片并询问这是否是它的家，您可能会说“是”。

Now, you might think that the word ‘home’ describes a building, not how you feel, but hear me out. Imagine trying to define ‘home’ for a computer. You might draw a picture of a house, or of different kinds of houses. A small child might show you a picture of a snail shell and ask if this is its home, and you might say ‘yes’.

很快你就会意识到房子可以有各种各样的外观。你可以将它定义为有人居住的地方。但请考虑一下：房屋被盗的人有时会抱怨不再有“家”的感觉——也许因此他们会搬家。同一所房子今天感觉像家，明天感觉就不像家了。

Fairly soon you would realize houses can look like pretty much anything. You might define it as a place where someone lives. But consider this: people whose houses have been burgled sometimes complain that it doesn’t feel like ‘home’ any more – and maybe as a result they move. The same house that felt like home one day doesn’t feel like home the next.

同样，当人们搬进新家时，他们经常会说“感觉不像家”。你会如何向计算机解释这一点？计算机如何理解这句歌词：“无论我把帽子放在哪里，那里就是我的家”？

Equally, when people move into a new house they often say something like ‘it doesn’t feel like home yet’. How would you explain this to a computer? How would a computer understand the song lyric: ‘Wherever I lay my hat, that’s my home’?

仔细想想，就会明白“家”这个词其实与建筑无关。它是一个用来描述你感觉的词。一个让你感到归属的地方。你可以在不同的地方感到“宾至如归”，有时在同一个地方却感觉不自在。你可以站在海滩上说“我终于到家了！”我们甚至可以想象我们的蜗牛在自己的壳里蜷缩起来时会有某种感觉——也许它确实有这种感觉。

When you think about it, it becomes clear that the word ‘home’ is not really about a building at all. It is a word to describe how you feel. A place where you feel you belong. You can feel ‘at home’ in different places, and sometimes not at home in the same place. You can stand on a beach and say ‘Finally, I’m home!’ We even imagine that our snail has some kind of feeling attached to being curled up in its own shell – and probably it does.

这是另一个表达感觉的词：椅子。你可能不习惯将“椅子”一词视为像“快乐”、“悲伤”等一样的词——一个描述你感觉的词。但它确实是。

Here’s another feeling word: chair. You probably aren’t used to thinking about the word ‘chair’ as a word like ‘happy’, ‘sad’, etc – as a word that describes how you feel. But it is.

像“椅子”这样的单词的奇怪之处在于，尽管逻辑学家倾向于认为它们描述的是某一类物体，但我们从未能够以计算机能够可靠识别椅子的方式解释其定义。这是为什么呢？

The odd thing about words like ‘chair’ is that although logicians have tended to think of them as describing a certain class of objects, we have never been able to explain the definition in such a way that a computer can reliably identify chairs. Why is this?

事实证明，当你说“椅子”时，你真正想说的是“让我感觉像‘椅子’的东西”。要理解这一点，请考虑一下，完全相同的物体在一种环境中感觉像椅子，但在另一种环境中感觉却不是（例如，艺术画廊）。

It turns out that when you say ‘chair’, what you really mean is ‘something that makes me feel “chair”’. To see this, consider that exactly the same object can feel like a chair in one setting but not in another (say, an art gallery).

所有椅子都没有共同的特征——它们唯一的共同点是你觉得它们适合坐在上面。你可以很容易地去另一个文化，坐在你觉得是椅子的东西上，然后当你被告知它实际上是仪式用的砧板时，你会感到尴尬。现在你觉得它不是椅子。

There is no common set of features to all chairs – all they have in common is that they are things that you feel are appropriate to sit on. You could quite easily travel to another culture, sit on something you felt was a chair, then feel embarrassment when told that it is actually a ritual chopping block. Now you feel that it isn’t a chair.

当我们说“椅子”时，我们的意思实际上更像是“我觉得在这种情况下，这是适合坐的东西。”

What we mean when we say chair is actually something more like ‘I feel like this is the kind of thing that is appropriate for sitting on, in this context.’

孩子们就是这样了解椅子的：不是通过字典中的定义，而是通过体验来完善他们对事物的感觉——一种体内平衡的延伸。一个年幼的孩子可能会坐在艺术画廊里的椅子雕塑上——但他们父母的震惊反应会改变他们对这种情况下物体的感觉。孩子们不断地爬上东西，而他们的父母则不断地咬紧牙关，嘶嘶地说：“从那里下来！”

This is how children learn about chairs: not through dictionary definitions, but through refining the way they feel about things through experience – a sort of extension of homeostasis. A young child might well sit on a chair sculpture in an art gallery – but their parent’s shocked reactions change the way they feel about objects in this context. Children are constantly clambering on things, and their parents constantly hissing: ‘Get down from there!’ through clenched teeth.

我要说的是：我们所有的词语都是情感词语。所有的词语。从“家”这个词到“椅子”这个词。它们都描述了我们对事物的感受。它们不是描述世界上的一类事物；而是描述事物和经历给我们带来的感受。你知道的成千上万个词语中的每一个都描述了一种微妙不同的感觉。

Here’s what I am saying: all of our words are feeling words. All of them. From the word ‘home’ to the word ‘chair’. They all describe how we feel about stuff. They do not describe a class of things in the world; instead they describe how things and experiences make us feel. Every one of the tens of thousands of words you know describes a subtly different feeling.

这意味着我们的词语在某种程度上总是模糊且多变的——并且我永远无法 100% 确定我所表达的意思与你的意思相同。

This means that our words are always fuzzy and changeable to some extent – and I am never 100 per cent sure that what I mean by a word is the same as what you mean.

值得花点时间去消化一下。有时人们会反对，说“好吧，1066 年，海斯廷斯战役，肯定不是一种感觉——而是一个事实”。如果你是英国人，那么你可能被教导 1066 年是一个特殊的日期——事实上，是海斯廷斯战役的日期。想到它，你会想起坐在历史课上的记忆，也许还有哈罗德眼睛中箭的可怕形象。

It’s worth taking some time to let this sink in. Sometimes people object and say things like ‘Well, surely 1066, the Battle of Haystings, isn’t a feeling – it’s a fact’. If you are British, then you will probably have been taught that 1066 is a special date – the date of the Battle of Haystings, in fact. Thinking of it conjures up memories of sitting in history class, the lurid image of Harold with an arrow in his eye perhaps.

那 1812 年呢？你对此有何感想？如果你是加拿大人，你可能不会觉得 1066 年比 1842 年更特别——但你可能对 1812 年有强烈的感情。每个加拿大人都知道加拿大赢得了 1812 年战争。1812 年之所以令人难忘，正是因为它让人感觉很特别。

How about 1812? How do you feel about that? If you are Canadian, you probably don’t feel like 1066 is any more special than, say, 1842 – but you probably have strong feelings about 1812. Every Canadian knows that Canada won the war of 1812. 1812 is memorable precisely because it feels special.

那你觉得如何？你觉得数字 7 怎么样？数字 18 怎么样？你能告诉我你对“7”的感觉与“18”的感觉究竟有何不同吗？数字 3,712 又如何？我怀疑你对 18 的感觉与对 3,712 的感觉非常不同。除非“3712”是你的密码——在这种情况下，你会对我提起它感到震惊。这是为什么呢？计算机对数字的感觉并没有什么不同。

How about this: what do you think about the number 7? And the number 18? Can you tell me exactly how your feeling about ‘7’ differs from your feeling about ‘18’? How about the number 3,712? I suspect you have very different feelings towards 18 than you do towards 3,712. Unless ‘3712’ is your password – in which case you are shocked that I brought it up. Why is that? Computers don’t feel differently about numbers.

现在想象一下人工智能面临的问题。每次计算机问“这个词是什么意思？”时，诚实的回答是：“它只是描述了我们对事物的感觉。”“椅子”是什么意思？答案：这意味着我们觉得某物是一把椅子。

So now imagine the problem that presents for AI. Every time the computer asks, ‘What does this word mean?’, the honest answer is: ‘It just describes the way we feel about stuff’. What does ‘chair’ mean? Answer: it means we feel like something is a chair.

我们没有像我们一样思考的计算机，因为我们没有会感觉的计算机。让计算机像我们一样理解“椅子”这个词的唯一方法是当它坐在错误的东西上时反复对它大喊大叫（或类似令人厌恶的东西）。但我们不会做这样的事情，除非这种情况有所改变，否则人工智能永远不会像人类智能。

We don’t have a computer that thinks like we do, because we don’t have a computer that feels. The only way to get a computer to understand the word ‘chair’ the way we do would be by repeatedly yelling at it (or something similarly aversive) as it sits on the wrong things. But we don’t do anything like this, and until that changes AI will never be remotely like human intelligence.

您可能想知道当今的计算机如何翻译语言。答案是：它们无法做到。它们所做的就是搜索短语的人工翻译，然后将结果“复制粘贴”在一起。实际上，它们不理解问题，所以它们抄袭我们的作业。即使是我们今天拥有的最先进的人工智能系统也只是复杂的统计近似值；它们根据许多人之前说过的话来预测一个人会说什么。

You might wonder how computers today manage to translate language. The answer is: they don’t. What they do is search around for human translations of phrases and ‘copy and paste’ the results together. In effect, they don’t understand the problem, so they copy our homework. Even the most advanced AI systems we have today are merely elaborate statistical approximations; they predict what a person would say based on what lots of people before have said.

这并不是说计算机不能智能，只是它们解决问题的方式完全不同——逻辑方式。例如，在识别猫的图片时，计算机不会看着图片思考：“这感觉像猫吗？”，而是查看我们已识别为猫的所有图片并将其与这些图片进行比较。当然，您可以看到为什么这会出错。

This is not to say that computers can’t be intelligent; they just solve problems in completely different ways – logical ways. For example when it comes to identifying pictures of cats, instead of looking at a picture and thinking: ‘Does this feel like a cat?’, the computer looks at all the pictures that we have identified as cats and compares it to those. And of course you can see why this would go wrong.

这个问题自柏拉图以来就一直困扰着哲学家。他们之所以感到困惑，是因为他们认为词语指的是外部世界的事物，而不是我们内心的感受。哲学家路德维希·维特根斯坦就是通过痛苦的经历才领悟到这一点的。他对语言产生了一种特殊的迷恋。

This is a problem that has foxed philosophers since Plato. They got confused because they assumed that words somehow refer to things in the outside world, rather than expressing feelings inside of us. One person who learned this the hard way was the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. He developed a particular fascination for language.

在他早期的作品中，他首先对世界进行了清晰、合乎逻辑的描述。在这个世界里，词语指代事物，词语之间的逻辑关系反映了世界上事物之间的逻辑关系。他说过这样的话：

In his early writing he starts out with a really clean, logical description of the world. A world in which words refer to things, and where the logical relations between words reflect logical relations between things in the world. He says things like:

可能事态之间存在着内在关系，这种关系在语言中通过提出这些事态的命题之间的内在关系来表达^。3

The existence of an internal relation between possible states of affairs expresses itself in language by an internal relation between the propositions presenting them.³

这听起来几乎像是数学问题，不是吗？但他越想，他的体系就越不成立。在他后来的著作中，他开始听起来相当神秘。在《论确定性》中，他写道：

That almost sounds mathematical, doesn’t it? But the more he thinks about this, the more his system falls apart. In his later writings he starts to sound quite mystical. In On Certainty he writes:

但更正确地说：我毫不犹豫地使用了“手”这个词以及句子中的所有其他词语，事实上，如果我想要怀疑它们的含义，我就会站在深渊面前——这表明，毫无疑问是语言游戏的本质……

But more correctly: The fact that I use the word ‘hand’ and all the other words in my sentence without a second thought, indeed that I should stand before the abyss if I wanted so much as to try doubting their meanings – shows that absence of doubt belongs to the essence of the language-game...

他开始将语言视为一种“游戏”，将词语视为无法独立于人们使用方式而存在的东西。对于后期的维特根斯坦来说，问“一个词语是什么意思？”就等于进入了一个充满疑惑的世界。

He has started to think of language as a ‘game’, and of words as things that can’t exist independently of the way people use them. To ask: ‘What does a word mean?’ is to enter into a whole world of doubt, for the later Wittgenstein.

但维特根斯坦认为语言就像游戏，这是错的：他用这个表达来描述他的感觉：语言是建立在人们之间以相同方式使用词语的默契基础上的（因此不存在你可以为自己发明的语言）。但问题是游戏有规则，而语言没有规则，因为从根本上说，一个词是否正确取决于它是否感觉正确。就像伦理学一样，我们稍后会看到。

But Wittgenstein is wrong that language is like a game: he used the expression to describe his feeling that language is based around a tacit agreement between people to use words in the same way (and that therefore there is no such thing as a language that you can invent for yourself). But the problem is that games have rules, and language doesn’t have rules because fundamentally whether or not a word is the right word is about whether or not it feels right. Just like ethics, as we will see in a bit.

我们“不假思索地使用词语”有一个非常具体的原因：因为词语只是表达我们的感受。我们不会考虑使用哪个合适的词语（特殊情况除外），我们只会说出与我们的感受相对应的词语。

There’s a very specific reason why we ‘use words without a second thought’: it’s because words just express how we feel. We don’t think about the appropriate word to use (except in unusual cases), we just speak the words that correspond to how we feel.

我们大多数时候都是不假思索地使用词语。看看你是如何参与日常对话的：对方正在说些什么——你的内心开始涌起感情（例如“这让我想起了我的一次经历！”）——在你意识到之前，话语就已经从你的嘴里涌出。很少（即使对于我们这些内向的人来说）事先准确地表达出你想说的话。

We literally use words without thinking most of the time. Take a look at how you participate in an everyday conversation: the other person is saying something – feelings start bubbling up inside you (for example ‘That reminds me of an experience I had!’) – and before you know it, words are tumbling out of your mouth. It’s very rare (even for us introverts) to formulate exactly what you wish to say in advance.

当这种情况发生时，例如当某人正在读剧本时，我们通常可以立即察觉到他们所说的话不自然且有点照本宣科。电影编剧需要很多技巧才能编写出台词，演员也需要很多技巧才能以一种不显得有预谋的方式表达台词。

When this does happen, for example when someone is reading from a script, we can generally immediately detect that what they are saying is unnatural and scripted somehow. It takes a lot of skill for a movie scriptwriter to script speech, and for the actors to deliver it, in a way that doesn’t come across as pre-meditated.

您可能已经注意到，我努力以这种方式写作 - 大量的破折号和明显的跳跃 - 在某种程度上破坏了语法的刻意和准逻辑规则，但更紧密地反映了表达方式在那一刻出现在我们面前的方式 - 从我们的情绪中涌现出来。

You may have noticed that I endeavour to write in this way – lots of dashes and obvious jumps – somewhat spoiling the deliberate and quasi-logical rules of grammar, but more closely reflecting the way expressions come to us in the moment – bubbling up from our sentiments.

维特根斯坦的错误很简单：他认为词语指的是事物，而不是感觉。只要他相信这一点，他就完蛋了。维特根斯坦比我聪明得多，但他的基本错误说明了我们今天在理解人类时面临的困境：无论你有多聪明——如果你从错误的假设开始，你就无法得到答案。词语不是指事物，而是表达感觉。感觉才是关于事物的。

Wittgenstein’s mistake was simple: he thought that words were about things, not feelings. As long as he believed this, he was screwed. It strikes me that Wittgenstein was a far smarter person than I, but his basic mistake illustrates the dilemma we face today with understanding human beings: it doesn’t matter how smart you are – if you start with the wrong assumptions you won’t be able to get to the answer. Words don’t refer to things, they express feelings. It is the feelings that are about things.

在人工智能领域，人们认为人类存储的是有关事件的事实数据，而不是对事件的反应。在教育领域，同样的错误导致我们想象我们可以创造一个让人们记忆信息的环境，而不是让人们体验反应的环境。

In the field of AI people assumed that humans store factual data about events, rather than their reactions to events. In education, this same error led us to imagine that we can create environments in which people memorize information, rather than environments in which they experience a reaction.

词语在学习中的作用

The role of words in learning

但学习的本质不会随着年龄的增长而发生很大变化，也不会从一个物种变成另一个物种——它只是被教育仪式所掩盖。在学校里，我们被告知学习就是为了通过考试而记住一些东西；但当我们学习如何融入同龄人时，真正的学习仍在继续：什么是酷的，什么是不酷的（你不会从站在你面前的老师那里学到很多关于这些的知识）。

But the nature of learning doesn’t change much as we age, or from one species to the next – it just gets obscured by educational ritual. At school we are told that learning consists of memorizing stuff in order to pass a test; but learning proper continues in the margins as we learn how to fit in from our peers: what’s cool, what’s not (and you won’t learn much about that from the teacher standing in front of you).

成年后，这种模式仍在继续：我们加入一个组织，并被给予教育模块来完成——但真正的学习发生在我们观察周围人对我们所做的事情的反应时。入职培训计划可能会告诉你标准的操作程序和公司价值观——但真正重要的可能是一个非常不同的故事——你会在接下来的几个月里亲自发现这个故事。

As adults, this pattern continues: we join an organization and are given educational modules to complete – but the real learning takes place as we observe the reactions of those around us to the things that we do. The induction programme may tell you about the standard operating procedures and company values – but what really matters may be a very different story – one that you will discover for yourself in the ensuing months.

许多人会说，他们要花六个月到一年的时间来“适应”。“适应”这个词组的意思是在特定的文化中知道什么是正确的做法，而人类通过观察周围人的反应来判断什么是正确或错误的做法。

Many people will report taking six months to a year to ‘find their feet’. ‘Finding one’s feet’ is an expression that means knowing what the right thing to do is in a given culture, and human beings determine what is the right or wrong thing to do by observing the reactions of those around them.

例如：假设你加入了一家位于伦敦的时髦律师事务所。入职培训计划告诉你，公司重视“真实性”和“包容性”。有一天，这位古怪的新实习生决定穿着夏威夷衬衫去与一位高级合伙人开会。你想知道会发生什么。从合伙人的面部表情判断，你得出结论，穿着夏威夷衬衫参加重要会议不是一个好主意，也不是“真实性”的可接受表达，也不是“包容性”一词所涵盖的。

For example: imagine you join a swanky London-based legal firm. The induction programme tells you the company values ‘authenticity’ and ‘inclusivity’. One day the zany new intern decides to wear his Hawaiian shirt to a meeting with a senior partner. You wonder what will happen. Judging from the partner’s facial expression, you conclude that wearing a Hawaiian shirt to important meetings is not a good idea and not an acceptable expression of ‘authenticity’ or encompassed by the term ‘inclusivity’.

由于这种隐性知识很少被写下来，而且学习体验在设计时也没有考虑到这一点，因此人们可能需要很长时间才能对自己所做的事情充满信心。

Since this kind of implicit knowledge is rarely written down, and since learning experiences are not designed with this in mind, it can take a long time for people to be confident about what they are doing.

我们的哲学偏见将我们带入了死胡同；我们想象人类的思想就像一张空白的纸，上面可以刻上文字。我们制造了替代书籍的机器，忠实地存储我们刻上的任何信息，同时却忽略了人类存储的是他们对世界的反应（甚至是他们对事实的反应），而不是事实本身。我们设计了一个教育系统，在这个系统中，人们被期望记住信息，而不是对经验做出反应，而这一切都变成了一团糟。

Our philosophical biases have led us down a blind alley; we imagined the human mind to be like a blank page, on which words could be inscribed. We built machines that replaced the book, faithfully storing whatever information we inscribed, all the while overlooking that humans store their reactions to the world (or even their reactions to facts) rather than the facts themselves. We designed an educational system in which people were expected to memorize information, rather than react to experiences, and it all turned into a terrible mess.

举个简单的例子：你们中的一些人可能已经注意到，我在之前描述“黑斯廷斯战役”时把“黑斯廷斯”拼错了“海斯廷斯”。如果你注意到了，你的反应是什么？你感到惊讶吗——也许有点震惊？你对我的看法有没有一丝愤怒或转变？我想你可能会记得这件事，甚至可能会对朋友说：“我不确定作者有多可信——我的意思是，他甚至不会拼写黑斯廷斯！”也许你甚至查过。

Let me give you a simple example: some of you may have noticed that I mis-spelt ‘Hastings’ as ‘Haystings’ when describing the ‘Battle of Hastings’ earlier. If you did notice it, what was your reaction? Were you surprised – perhaps a little shocked? Was there a hint of outrage or a shift in your perceptions of me? I suspect it is the sort of thing you might remember, and perhaps even remark to a friend ‘I’m not sure how credible the author is – I mean, he can’t even spell Hastings!’ Maybe you even looked it up.

惊讶和愤慨是我们对违反公认规范的事情做出的反应。这些反应有助于让这些奇特事件留在我们心中，因此更有可能成为八卦。每个反应都表明你对世界的心理模式进行了调整——你付出了额外的努力。当然，并不是世界上发生的所有意外事件都会促使你改变思维方式：只有那些足以引起反应的重要事件才会改变思维方式。

Surprise and indignation are the way we react to things that violate accepted norms. These reactions help such peculiar events to stay with us, and are more likely to make their way into gossip as a result. Each reaction signals an adjustment to your mental model of the world – an investment of additional effort on your part. Of course not all the unexpected things that happen in the world drive a change in your thinking: only the ones significant enough to elicit a reaction.

如果我们每个人对事物的感觉都不同，那么像这样的声音系统怎么可能起作用呢？答案是，它不可能。幸运的是，从生物学上讲，我们对事物的感觉是相似的（人们会像狗一样因痛苦而尖叫），然后我们经历了一个漫长的成熟和社会化过程，我们学会在共同的经历中发出类似的声音。例如，当下雨和寒冷时，我们会说：“哎呀！我讨厌这种天气”，其他人会说：“我也是”，当我们感受到同样的事物时，我们会有一种联系感，因为我们发出了正确的声音。

How could a system of noises like this possibly work if we all feel differently about things? The answer is, it couldn’t. Fortunately we are set up, biologically, to feel similarly about things (people will yelp in pain, just as dogs do), and then we go through a long process of maturation and socialization where we learn to make similar sounds in response to shared experiences. When it is rainy and cold, for example we say: ‘Ugh! I hate this weather’, and other people say: ‘Me too’, and we feel a sense of connection at feeling the same things, because we are making the right noises.

这样，我们的性格、反应、记忆和文化就形成了一种环环相扣的机制。我们的文化决定了我们的反应：我们感知、考虑和记住什么。随着时间的推移，我们的反应决定了我们会成为什么样的人（反之亦然）。我们讲述的关于自己的故事反映了对我们来说重要的事情，而这些故事又将我们与构成我们文化的更广泛的重要故事联系起来。

In this way our personality, reactions, memory and culture form an interlocking mechanism. Our culture determines what we react to: what we perceive, consider and remember. Over time, our reactions determine the type of person we become (and vice-versa). The stories we tell about ourselves reflect the things that matter to us, which in turn connect us to the broader library of stories about things that matter that makes up our culture.

自从人类有了故事以来，故事形式就一直是、并且仍然是学习和知识传递的核心机制。1969 年，心理学家鲍尔和克拉克表明，如果让人们将不相关的单词转换成一个故事，他们的记忆力就会提高七倍。4^这是认知心理学家所知的最大记忆效应之一。

As far back as the human story goes, the story format has been, and continues to be, the central mechanism for learning and knowledge transfer. In 1969 the psychologists Bower and Clark showed that if you had people convert unrelated words into a story, it improved their retention seven-fold.⁴ This is one of the largest memory effects known to cognitive psychologists.

这样做是有效的，因为在创作故事时，我们为原本毫无关联的词语添加了情感意义；我们将它们转换成我们想要存储的格式。你的身体是携带故事的载体，而故事反过来又将我们彼此联系起来，并让我们拥有共同的意义。

It works, because in creating a story, we add emotional significance to words that are otherwise unconnected; we convert them into a format we are designed to store. Your body is a vehicle for carrying stories around, stories which in turn connect us to each other and a shared sense of meaning.

维特根斯坦被误导了，因为他从一开始就试图创造一种对世界的逻辑描述。他忽略了逻辑和数学不是自然语言——它们是一种人工语言。与描述世界上事物给我们带来感受的人类语言不同，数学和逻辑是最近才创造出来用来描述世界上事物之间逻辑关系的语言。

Wittgenstein was misled because from the outset he tried to create a logical description of the world. What he missed is that logic and mathematics are not a natural language – they are an artificial language. Unlike human language, which describes the way things in the world make us feel, mathematics and logic are languages recently created to describe the logical relations between things in the world.

因此，它们几乎不可能被人类使用。绝大多数人都难以理解复杂的数学，心理学文献中充斥着人类思维偏离逻辑的种种方式。

As such they are almost impossible for humans to use. The vast majority of people struggle with complex maths, and the psychological literature is brimming with the list of ways in which human thinking deviates from the logical.

要了解这一点，请考虑数字 3,756,981——感觉如何？可能感觉与 3,684,782 没什么不同。但问题是：它们都感觉“很多”，不是吗？（​​当然，超过某个点后，任何数字——无论多大——都感觉“很多”。）这就是为什么你以后很难回忆起你听到的是哪个数字——因为它们感觉非常相似。你可能对数字“3”有独特的反应，所以你可能会记得“它是一个以 3 开头的大数字”。

To see this, consider the number 3,756,981 – how does that feel? Probably it doesn’t feel much different to 3,684,782. But here’s the thing: they both feel like ‘a lot’, don’t they? (And of course beyond a certain point any number – no matter how big – just feels like ‘a lot’.) This is why you will later struggle to recall which of the numbers you heard – because they both feel very similar. You probably have a distinct reaction to the number ‘3’, so you might remember that ‘it was a big number starting with a three’.

“感觉很多”是人类对非常大的数字的反应。然而，数学和逻辑是非常适合计算机使用的语言——使计算机能够做我们不能做的事情，但同样确保计算机永远无法像我们一样理解世界。

‘Feeling like a lot’ is how humans react to really big numbers. Mathematics and logic are, however, languages perfectly suited for use by computers – enabling computers to do things that we can’t, but equally ensuring that computers will never be able to understand the world in the way that we do.

这就是为什么人类很难理解一千亿和一万亿之间的区别——因为尽管它们是截然不同的数字，但它们对我们来说感觉非常相似——它们两者都感觉像是一个庞大的数字。这不是我们的认知偏见或缺陷，而只是我们工作方式的结果：我们储存对事物的反应，而当我们的反应相似时，我们的记忆就会变得混乱。

This is the reason why humans struggle to understand the difference between one hundred billion and one trillion – because despite the fact that they are dramatically different numbers they feel very similar to us – they both feel like vast numbers. This is not a bias or a flaw in our cognition, it is simply a consequence of the way that we work: we store our reactions to things, and where our reactions are similar our memory will be muddled.

因此，一代又一代的哲学家都犯了同样的基本错误，并因此陷入困境：他们假设词语指的是事物，而我们词语之间的关系对应于世界上事物之间的关系。但这是错误的：词语只指我们的感受，而我们的感受是关于事物的。这解释了词语奇怪的不精确性和奇妙的诗意——我们的感受在边缘处是模糊的，并且会根据上下文而变化。

So generations of philosophers have made the same basic error and tied themselves up in knots as a result: they have assumed that words refer to things, and that the relationships between our words corresponds to the relationships between things in the world. But this is wrong: words refer only to our feelings, and it is our feelings that are about things. This accounts for the weird inexactitude and marvellous poetry of words – our feelings are blurred at the edges and can change depending on the context.

当然，人们成为哲学家的原因是追求真理（你可以肯定，这背后总有一个情感原因），因此说“所有认知都是情感的一种形式”会让一些人立即深感不安——它似乎暗示着一种鲁莽的相对主义。但事实并非如此：我们的感受基于我们与世界的物理联系，而且由于我们是生理上相似的生物，我们的经历有着共同的根源。

Of course the reason one becomes a philosopher is the pursuit of truth (and you can be sure there is always an emotional reason behind that), and so saying: ‘All cognition is a form of emotion’ is immediately deeply troubling to some people – it seems to imply a sort of reckless relativism. But nothing could be further from the truth: our feelings are based on our physical connection to the world, and because we are physiologically similar creatures, our experiences have a common root.

然后，我们的文化根据重要性来决定我们看到什么和看不到什么：在一种文化中，一个人可能会说“你看到那个劳力士了吗！？”；在另一种文化中，人们可能不会注意到某人佩戴的手表类型，而在第三种文化中，“手表”可能根本没有任何意义。

Our cultures then determine what we see and what we do not, according to what matters: in one culture a person might say ‘Did you see that Rolex!?’; in another people might not notice the type of watch someone is wearing, and in a third ‘watches’ might have no significance at all.

我们对世界的体验建立在可以追溯到我们单细胞起源的基础之上：我们的稳态根源。当两个人说：“这沙子很热”时，这是因为他们在生理上被设计成以相同的方式体验它——对它有相同的感觉。这就是为什么哲学家弗里德里希·尼采写道：“所有真理的证据都只来自感官。” ⁵

Our experiences of the world are built on a foundation that extends all the way back to our single-celled origins: our homeostatic roots. When two people say: ‘This sand is hot’, it is because they are designed, physiologically, to experience it in the same way – to feel the same way about it. This is why the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche writes: ‘All evidence of truth come only from the senses’.⁵

因此，两位科学家能够得出相同的观察结果，只是因为一个人对事物的感觉不是“自由飘浮”的，而是根植于我们对世界的物理体验中。我们作为个体的多样性源于我们作为人类的相似性，就像树枝从树干延伸出来一样。

And so two scientists will be able to make the same observations, only because the way a person feels about things does not ‘float free’ but is hard-wired into our physical experience of the world. Our diversity as individuals extends from our similarities as humans, much as the branches of a tree extend from the trunk.

一旦你开始理解词语——我们所有的词语——仅仅指我们对事物的感受（它们在我们身上引起的反应），人工智能和哲学中的一些难题就开始解开了。词语从来都没有精确的含义。它们的含义会在不同情况下或根据我们的感受而改变。对于爱狗的人和怕狗的人来说，“狗”这个词的含义非常不同。想想这句话“狗向他扑来”——这是一个快乐的想法还是一个可怕的想法？

Once you begin to understand that words – all our words – simply refer to the way we feel about things (the reaction they cause in us), some of the difficult problems in AI and philosophy start to unravel. Words don’t ever have precise meanings. Their meaning can change in different circumstances or depending on how we feel. The word ‘dog’ means very different things to people who love dogs and to those who are afraid of them. Consider the phrase ‘The dog bounded towards him’ – is that a happy thought or a frightening one?

我们会随着成长学会使用一个词，而不是通过阅读字典。一个词在一种文化中的感觉可能与（翻译的）词在另一种文化中的感觉大不相同。双语人士在说每种语言时可能会感觉自己是不同的人（也许他们确实是不同的人）^。6

We learn to use a word as we grow up, not from reading it a dictionary. How a word feels in one culture may be very different from how the (translated) word feels in another. People who are bilingual may feel like different people when they speak each language (and perhaps they really are).⁶

因此，语言表达情感，情感是对世界的反应。在我读过的所有哲学家中——从赫拉克利特到齐泽克——只有弗里德里希·尼采似乎真正理解了这一点。在《快乐的科学》中，他写道：“思想是我们情感的影子——总是更黑暗、更空虚、更简单。” ⁷

So words express feelings, and feelings are reactions to the world. Of all the philosophers I have read – from Heraclitus to Zizek – only Friedrich Nietzsche seemed to have truly understood this. In The Gay Science he writes: ‘Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier, simpler’.⁷

很有可能，“同性恋”这个词引起了你的反应，极大地改变了你的看法和期望。当尼采写他的书时，这个词是无害的，与“快乐”同义。我们的思想是伴随我们经历的情绪的痕迹，我们的话语只是它们所对应的复杂情绪的表达。

In all likelihood, the word ‘gay’ caused a reaction in you, altering your perceptions and expectations significantly. When Nietzsche wrote his book, the word was innocuous, synonymous with ‘joyful’. Our thoughts are the traces of the sentiments that accompanied our experience, and our words are merely vocalizations of the complex emotions to which they correspond.

当我说“狗”时，我指的是我一生中与这些动物相处的经历。你和我会有一些共同点，比如它们发出的独特吠叫声，但在另一个层面上，当我们说“狗”这个词时，你和我可能会有截然不同的感觉——就像两个人可能都使用“爱”这个词，但彼此却相距甚远。

When I say ‘dog’, I refer to my lifetime’s experience of these creatures. Some elements you and I will have in common, for example the distinctive barking noises that they make, but on another level you and I may feel very different things when we say the word ‘dog’ – just as two people may both use the word ‘love’ but remain worlds apart.

当我们用文字描述我们的世界时，我们是在描述我们的经历给我们带来的感受。这就是为什么人类天生就是讲故事的人——文字反映了经历的情感影响，当我们把它们串联起来时，就创造了一个故事。因为我们成长于一个共同的文化中——我指的是一种人们在某种程度上对类似事物做出类似反应的文化——我可以学会使用文字。我可以用一个词来描述我内心的一系列感受，并且相当有信心，它也描述了你内心的一系列类似感受。

When we use words to describe our world, we are describing how our experiences made us feel. This is why humans are natural storytellers – words reflect the emotional impact of experiences, and when we string them together we create a story. Because we grow up in a shared culture – by which I mean a culture in which people, to some extent, react in similar ways to similar things – I can learn to use words. I can use a word that describes a set of feelings in me, and be reasonably confident that it describes a similar set of feelings in you.

有了文字，我就能让你感受到我的感受。有趣的是，音乐也有这种力量，我们稍后会谈到这一点——但如果有帮助的话，可以把文字想象成歌曲中的音符：它们是表达你感受的声音，当你唱出这些声音时，别人也会有类似的感受。

With words, I can make you feel what I feel. Interestingly, music also has this power, something to which we will return later on – but, if it helps, think of words as being much like the notes in a song: they are noises that express how you feel, and when you sing them someone else feels something similar.

我们已经习惯了在电影中听配乐，以至于我们忽略了这样一个问题：“为什么？”为什么电影几乎总是有配乐？好的配乐可以补充故事情节，加深我们的情感体验，强调我们的反应。

We have become so used to our cinematic experiences being accompanied by a soundtrack that we overlook the question: ‘Why?’ Why do movies almost always have a soundtrack? A good soundtrack complements the storyline, deepening our emotional experiences, accentuating our reactions.

你可以更清楚地看到教育哪里出了问题：当父母给孩子读故事时，讲得好的父母会使用夸张的表情、手势和语调。这是这个过程的关键部分，因为故事引起的反应会被储存起来。

You can begin to see more clearly where education goes wrong: when parents read stories to children, the ones who do it well use exaggerated expressions, gestures and intonation to do so. This is a critical part of the process, since it is the reactions that the story causes that are stored.

但教育并不理解学习：讲师很少是讲故事的人——他们没有明确认识到戏剧性表达在编码信息方面的重要性。学习往往被简化为单纯的事实。想象一下，一位家长在睡前讲故事的方式是 PowerPoint 演示，用一系列要点总结《金发姑娘和三只熊》。你更有可能记住那些对自己的学科表现出真正热情和激情的老师，以及那些讲故事让事情变得生动的老师。

But education doesn’t understand learning: lecturers are rarely storytellers – they don’t explicitly recognize the importance of dramatic expression in encoding information. Often learning is reduced to mere facts. Picture a parent whose bedtime story approach is a PowerPoint show summarizing Goldilocks and the Three Bears in a series of bullet points. You are far more likely to remember those teachers who conveyed genuine enthusiasm and passion for their subject, and who told stories that brought things to life.

感觉和思想之间的关系类似于色彩和绘画之间的关系：一幅画是由色块组成的。没有一幅画不是由色块组成的——因为这就是一幅画。没有一种思想不是情绪的模式——因为这就是思想。

The relationship between feelings and thoughts is similar to that between colour and paintings: a painting is made up of patches of colour. There are no paintings that are not made up of patches of colour – because that is what a painting is. There are no thoughts that are not a pattern of emotions – because that’s what thoughts are.

颜色本身（就像我们的感觉）可能相对简单，但通过组合和复杂性，它们会产生复杂而有意义的图案。我们给画作命名——比如“蒙娜丽莎”——就像我们给思想命名——比如“椅子”或“家”。这些都是我们的语言。没有必要去想我们是否应该有更多的词语来描述我们的情绪——我们使用的每一个词都描述了一种独特的情绪。每个词都描述了一种感觉（是的，甚至是数字“42”）。

The colours themselves (like our feelings) may be relatively simple, but through combination and complexity they give rise to elaborate, meaningful patterns. We give names to paintings – names like ‘Mona Lisa’ – just as we give names to thoughts – like ‘chair’ or ‘home’. These are our words. There is no point in wondering if we shouldn’t have more words to describe our emotions – every word we use describes a distinct emotion. Every word describes a feeling (yes, even the number ‘42’).

我们的大脑还非常善于想象自己在未来或在另一个地方的感受。8我的意思并不是准确预测我们的感受（我们在这方面^实际上很差）；我的意思是，你可以坐在火车上，很容易地想象坐在那些经过的屋顶上是什么感觉——或者成为在雨中行走、努力撑着伞的人。你可能错了，但毫无疑问，你可以很容易地想象它。

Our minds are also remarkably good at imagining how we would feel; in the future, or in a different place.⁸ I don’t mean accurately predicting how we would feel (we are actually quite bad at that); what I mean is that you can sit on a train and easily imagine what it would feel like to sit on those rooftops that are passing by – or be the person walking in the rain, struggling with an umbrella. You might be wrong, but there is no doubt that you can easily imagine it.

人类似乎天生就想象情感，而不是后来才学会的。我经常想知道，为什么我女儿无论去哪里都想买毛绒玩具。所以我问了她。她说：“我可以和他们谈论一些我自己觉得很傻的事情。”孩子的大脑会自动将情感归因于一切，对毛绒玩具完全没有问题。

It seems that human beings imagine feelings by default – not as something they learn to do later on. I have often wondered what it is about soft toys that makes my daughter want to purchase them wherever we go. So I asked her. She said: ‘I can talk to them about things I would feel silly talking on my own.’ The mind of a child automatically ascribes feelings to everything, and has no trouble at all with cuddly toys.

如果你身边有小孩，可以尝试这个实验：问他们如果你踢一棵树，它会是什么感觉。或者当家里所有人都离开去度假时，房子会是什么感觉。你会惊讶于他们回答这些问题是多么容易。如果你问成年人这些问题，他们可能会认为你正承受着压力——或者他们可能会认为你很有诗意。这是因为我们的社会会设法掩盖我们心中真正在想什么（感谢柏拉图等人）。

If you have some small children to hand, try this experiment: ask them how a tree would feel if you were to kick it. Or how a house feels when everyone in the family leaves to go on holiday. You will be surprised at how easily they answer these sorts of questions. If you ask an adult these sorts of questions, they might think you are suffering from stress – or they might think that you are rather poetic. This is because our society contrives to obscure what is really going on in our minds (thanks to Plato and co).

这种编码世界的方式，即根据经验在我们心中产生的反应，为我们打开了计算机无法实现的可能性，比如诗歌和隐喻。它也能很好地与并行处理配合使用，而并行处理是神经元网络所做的处理。当我们看到某样东西时，视觉特征会触发一系列情绪反应，然后——砰！——我们立刻感觉到它是什么（当然我们可能错了）。

This way of encoding the world, i.e. according to the reactions that experiences create in us, opens us up to possibilities that are closed to computers – like poetry and metaphor. It also works well with parallel processing – the kind of processing that networks of neurons do. When we see something, the visual features trigger a set of emotional response and – Bam! – instantly we feel what it is (of course we can be wrong).

我们通常在这个句子中使用“知道”这个词，但更准确的说法是，我们感觉到某物是什么。这个过程发生在我们有意识地意识到它之前；当我们遇到威胁性刺激时，我们的神经系统会让我们做好“战斗或逃跑”的准备，甚至在我们能够说出威胁性的东西是什么之前。9 我们^绝对不会做的是经历一个漫长的搜索过程，将我们看到的东西一一与储存在我们记忆中的东西进行比较。那很愚蠢，而且永远不会奏效。

We usually use the word ‘know’ in this sentence, but it would be more accurate to say that we feel what something is. This process takes place before we are consciously aware of it; our nervous system will prepare us for ‘fight or flight’ when we encounter threatening stimuli before we can even say what the threatening thing is.⁹ What we absolutely do not do is go through a protracted search process where we compare what we are seeing, one by one, to things stored in our memory. That would be silly and would never work.

当然，如果你有足够的处理能力和足够大的数据库，你可以创建一个做类似事情的系统的幻觉——例如通过查看数百万个类似的人工翻译并计算出最佳猜测来翻译一个短语。

Of course, if you had enough processing power and a big enough database, you could create the illusion of a system that does something similar – for example translating a phrase by looking at millions of similar human translations and calculating a best guess.

当人类向他人描述事物时，我们会将一系列的感觉串联起来，用词语来描述这些感觉。但是，由于两种截然不同的事物能在我们心中唤起类似的感觉，我们能够实现创造性的飞跃。诗句“我像一朵云一样孤独地徘徊”之所以有意义，是因为我们能够将孤独的感觉与我们看到天空中孤独的一朵云时的感觉联系起来。

When humans describe things for other people, we chain together sets of feelings, using words to describe those feelings. But because two very different things can evoke similar feelings in us, we are able to make creative leaps. The poetic line: ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ only makes sense because we are able to link the feeling of being alone with a feeling that we have when we see a cloud alone in the sky.

事实上，因为词语描述的是感觉，而不是事物，所以我们可以说出各种各样的事情，其他人可以理解，但计算机永远无法理解。我可以说：“他在会议期间就像一头冲进瓷器店的公牛”，你可以理解，因为我比较的是两者背后的感觉——不是因为这个人看起来像一头公牛，也不是因为会议是在瓷器店举行的。

In fact, because words describe feelings, not things, we can say all manner of things that other people can understand but computers never will. I can say: ‘He was like a bull in a china shop during the meeting’ and you can understand it, because I am comparing the feelings that underlie both – not because the person in question looks like a bull, or because the meeting was held in a china shop.

当然，我们可以告诉计算机“瓷器店里的公牛”意味着鲁莽，但如果你说“玻璃器皿店里的袋鼠”，我会理解你的意思（可能觉得很有趣），而计算机不会。我们之所以能够进行这种比较，是因为这两种情况都会引起类似的情绪——而不是因为它们的语义特征。

Of course we can tell a computer that ‘bull in a china shop’ means reckless, but if you had said ‘a kangaroo in a glassware store’ I would have understood you (and possibly thought it was quite amusing), and the computer would not. The reason we are able to make this comparison is that both situations evoke a similar sentiment – not because of their semantic features.

总之，我们用文字来描述自己的感受，当我们说出这些感受时，其他人也会有类似的感受。这就是为什么人们是天生的讲故事者——一切都被编码为感受，文字会唤起这些感受。

In summary, we use words to describe our feelings, and when we speak them other people have similar feelings. That’s why people are natural storytellers – everything is encoded as feelings, and words evoke those feelings.

如果你仔细聆听人们的谈话，通常会发生这样的事情：一个人讲一个故事，然后另一个人讲一个相关的故事等等。如果你仔细观察这段对话，你会发现，将对话连成一个整体的因素是感觉：我之所以选择告诉你一个故事而不是另一个故事，是因为你的故事让我感受到了在其他地方也感受到的东西。这就是我们说“提醒”的意思。我们可能会说：“看着蓝天上的鸟儿让我想起了在海滩的那段时光”，而真正发生的事情是，一种感觉激发了另一种类似的感觉。

If you listen closely to people having a conversation, something like this is usually happening: one person tells a story, then another person tells a related story and so on. If you look really closely at this exchange you will see that what binds the conversation into a whole is feeling: the reason I chose to tell you one story rather than another is that your story made me feel something that I have felt somewhere else. This is what we mean when we say ‘reminding’. We might say: ‘Looking at the birds in the blue sky reminded me of that time on the beach’ and what is really going on is that one feeling is activating another similar feeling.

思想的基石不是“事实”或“知识”，而是“反应”、“故事”和“经验”。由于不同的人对事件的反应不同，因此，如果你希望某人发生某种改变，那么与某人建立联系就很重要。

The building blocks of thought are not ‘facts’ or ‘knowledge’; instead they are ‘reactions’ and ‘stories’ and ‘experiences’. Because of the way that different people react differently to events, it is important to establish a connection to someone if you wish them to change in some way.

“建立联系”是人们在很多情况下都认为很重要的事情，但却无法确切说明原因，所以我想说得更准确：建立联系意味着了解一个人在乎什么，并传达出你也有同样的感受。你在派对上遇到一个女孩。你说：“我喜欢这首歌”，她说：“我也喜欢”，那一刻你们都笑了。

‘Establishing a connection’ is the kind of thing that people tend to feel is important in lots of contexts, without quite being able to say why, so I would like to be quite precise: establishing a connection means understanding what matters to a person, and communicating that you feel the same way. You meet a girl at a party. You say: ‘I love this song’, she says: ‘I love it too’, and in that moment you both smile.

语言是我们分享重要事物的一种方式。了解一个人关心的事情至关重要，因为这些心理特征决定了他们会对哪些事情做出反应，而一个人的反应决定了他们的经历被编码的方式。当我们与任何人互动时，我们要么对他们已经关心的事情做出反应（“拉”），要么在旧的关心之上建立新的关心（“推动”）。

Language is one way in which we share the things that matter. Understanding what matters to a person is essential, since these psychological features determine those things that they will react to, and a person’s reactions determine the way in which their experiences are encoded. When we interact with anyone we are either responding to the things they already care about (‘pull’), or we are building new cares on top of the old (‘push’).

在下一章中，我们将探讨这对学习设计意味着什么。

In the next chapter we will look at what this means for learning design.

我辞去心理学讲师的职务，部分原因是我已经厌倦了告诉人们只要花时间应用我一直宣扬的一些理论，他们就能改变世界。我想亲自尝试一下。

When I left my job as a psychology lecturer it was, in part, because I was growing tired of telling people how they could change the world if only they took the time to apply some of the theory I kept banging on about. I wanted to try it for myself.

几年后，我管理着一个开发团队，25 年前，我们创建的数字培训在今天看来仍然具有未来感：动态生成的人工智能角色在随机模拟中与学习者互动，虚拟环境可供探索等等。我们对自己所做的工作既兴奋又自豪。

A few years later, I was running a team of developers, and 25 years ago we were creating digital training that would still look futuristic today: dynamically generated AI characters that interacted with learners in randomized simulations, virtual environments to explore and so on. We were both excited by, and proud of, the work we were doing.

我们开发了一种教学方法，我们称之为“看-听-做”模型（不要与史酷比模型混淆），该方法大致基于杰罗姆·布鲁纳的表征阶段理论¹，根据该理论，人们以三种格式编码信息：行为（通过做）、图像（通过图像）和符号（通过语言）。通过确保学习者使用所有三种编码方式，我们大大提高了学习内容的有效性。或者我们是这么认为的。

We had developed an instructional approach we called the See–Hear–Do model (not to be confused with the Scooby-Doo model), based loosely on Jerome Bruner’s Stages of Representation theory¹, according to which people encode information in three formats: enactive (by doing), iconic (through images) and symbolic (through language). By ensuring that learners used all three encoding modalities, we were greatly enhancing the effectiveness of our learning content. Or so we thought.

我想，如果能出现在各种会议上，指着一个条形图展示我们的方法有多有效，那一定很好。幸运的是，我们接待了一位荷兰来访研究生玛格丽塔，我们一起设计了一个实验。

I think I imagined it would be nice to appear on the conference circuit, pointing to a bar graph showing how much more effective our approach had proved to be. As luck would have it, we were host to a work placement – a visiting Dutch research student called Marguerita – and together we designed an experiment.

在我们的实验中，同样的信息——有关太阳系的信息——被开发成五种格式。每种格式都不同：最基本的版本只是纯文本，其他版本集成了更多媒体——音频、视频，最终形成了一个包含音频、视频和互动练习的版本。所有的呈现模式。然后，给大学生小组提供其中一种不同的格式和相同的任务：使用这些材料 30 分钟，然后进行测试以查看他们能回忆起多少。

In our experiment the same information – information about the solar system – was developed into five formats. Each format was different: the most basic version was simply plain text, other versions integrated more media – audio, video, culminating in a version incorporating audio, video and interactive exercises. All the modes of representation. Groups of university students were then given one of these different formats and the same task: use the materials for 30 minutes, then take a test to see how much they could recall.

我们的假设是，更丰富的编码格式将产生更高的回忆分数。当时人们普遍认为，互动式学习比更便宜、互动性更低的学习方式更好，这一点也有所帮助。

Our hypothesis was that the richer encoding formats would produce superior recall scores. It helped that at the time the received wisdom was also that interactive learning was better than cheaper, less interactive formats.

我们进行了实验。我们将分数加起来。结果很明显：各种格式的有效性没有显著差异。事实上，平均而言，学习纯文本格式的学生表现略好。想象一下：意识到也许整个以在线内容制作为基础的行业都可以被文本文档取代^。2

We ran the experiment. We added up the scores. The results were clear: there was no significant difference in the effectiveness of the various formats. In fact, the students who had studied the text-only format performed slightly better, on average. Imagine that: realizing that perhaps an entire industry based around the production of online content could be replaced – with text documents.²

我们的研究没有发表或经过同行评审。我可以看出，我们的样本规模和代表性存在不足。大学食堂几乎不是一个受控环境。但我监督过足够多的学生心理学实验，知道我们的研究设计从根本上是合理的，易于复制，而且如果我们的教学设计方法的效果只有我们认为的一半，我们就应该看到效果。

Our research wasn’t published or peer-reviewed. I could see that there were shortcomings in the size and representativeness of our sample. A university cafeteria was hardly a controlled environment. But I had supervised enough student psychology experiments to know that our research design was fundamentally sound, easy to replicate, and that if our instructional design approach was even half as effective as we believed it to be we should have seen an effect.

事实上，研究结果也与困扰我一段时间的一个观察结果相吻合：互联网正在蓬勃发展，并迅速成为一种学习工具。但互联网提供的绝大多数信息只是纯文本。人们似乎并不介意。事实上，如果你想要找到一些东西，你可能会更喜欢纯文本而不是其他格式。

As it happened, the results also tied into an observation that had been bothering me for a while: the internet was booming and fast achieving recognition in its own right as a learning tool. But the vast majority of information that was being served up was just – well – plain text. And people didn’t seem to mind. In fact, if you were looking to find something out, you probably preferred plain text over other formats.

尽管学习和开发行业忙于相互颁发教学设计认证，但很明显，教学设计并没有显著改善现实世界中的学习。事实上，人们会主动避免采用包含教学设计的格式（例如电子学习模块），而更喜欢没有教学设计的格式（例如 Google 提供的页面或 YouTube 提供的视频）。我意识到，教学设计是胡言乱语。

Even as the learning and development industry were busily handing out instructional design accreditations to each other, it was becoming clear that instructional design was not significantly improving learning in the real world. In fact, people would actively avoid formats (such as e-learning modules) that incorporated instructional design, and prefer formats (such as the pages served up by Google, or videos served up by YouTube) that had none. Instructional design, I realized, is mumbo-jumbo.

如今，数十亿人都在 TikTok 上学习，却避开那些免费学习图书馆，因为这些图书馆庞大的课程目录已经积满数字灰尘。教育就是不懂这一点。教育不懂学习。

Today, billions of people are learning things on TikTok while avoiding all those free-to-use learning libraries whose sprawling course catalogues gather digital dust. Education just doesn’t get it. Education doesn’t get learning.

只需粗略浏览一下 TikTok，就能发现让所有这些学习如此具有粘性的因素——无论是了解名人、舞蹈动作、时尚还是猜火车——要么是因为它让我们兴奋，要么是谈论它的人非常兴奋。让我们感动的东西会浮出水面。昨天我了解到，50 条橡皮筋足以阻止一个短跑的人。确实很奇怪。

Even a superficial glance at TikTok reveals that what makes all that learning so sticky – whether it is learning about celebrities, dance moves, fashion or trainspotting – namely that it is either that it’s the kind of stuff that excites us, or that the people talking about it are very excitable. The stuff that moves us bubbles to the top. Yesterday I learned that 50 rubber bands is enough to stop a sprinting human being. Bizarre indeed.

你的反应可能是，这些都不是人们应该学习的东西——问题就在这里。尽管我们希望人们像电脑一样运作——完全按照权威的指示行事，但他们不会也永远不会这样做。中枢神经系统不是这样设计的。

Your reaction is probably that these are not the sorts of things one should be learning about – and there lies the problem. Much as we might like people to function like computers – to do exactly as they are instructed by an authority, they don’t and never will. Central nervous systems are not designed that way.

教育是以内容为中心，而不是以人为中心。它彻头彻尾是艾宾浩斯教育。它的基础是强迫人们努力记住对他们来说并不重要的东西，而教学设计代表了一套实现这一点的技术。我们创造了各种各样的组织、系统和技术来扭曲人们的形象，而不是理解他们是如何自然发展的。

Education is content-centric, not human-centric. It’s Ebbinghaus through and through. It is based on forcing people to try and remember stuff that doesn’t matter to them, and instructional design represents a set of techniques for doing this. We have created all manner of organizations, systems and techniques for bending people out of shape, rather than understanding how they develop naturally.

当然，有大量研究支持教学设计。但就像遗忘曲线一样，这些研究既准确又具有误导性。

There is, of course, a great deal of research in support of instructional design. But rather like the forgetting curve, this research is both accurate and misleading.

许多人都难以接受科学研究既准确又具有误导性这一观点，但事实上，这通常是正确的。科学史表明，一种理论最终会被另一种更好的理论所取代。旧的、错误的理论总是得到研究的充分支持，而新的理论通常（一开始）几乎没有或根本没有支持。换句话说，找到证据来支持一个最终被证明是错误的想法并不难。

Many people struggle with the idea that scientific research can be both accurate and misleading – but in reality this is generally true. The history of science shows that one theory is eventually replaced by another, better, theory. It is always the case that the old, incorrect, theory is well supported by research, and usually the new theory has little or no support (at first). In other words, it isn’t hard to find evidence to support an idea that, ultimately, turns out to be wrong.

那么，一个支持很少或根本没有的理论如何取代支持很多的理论呢？通过解释力。总是有一些事情是旧理论无法完全解释的。新理论可以解释这些。

So how does a theory with little or no support replace one with plenty? Through explanatory power. Invariably there are things that the old theory just never quite explained. The new theory accounts for these.

学习者在面对实际任务时通常更喜欢没有格式的格式，而不是有格式的格式，这对教学设计来说无疑是一个合理的挑战。我宁愿选择谷歌，也不愿选择电子学习模块。教学设计研究经常重复艾宾浩斯的错误：在试图确定最佳学习格式时，它忽略了这样一个事实：在现实世界中，我们学习的是对我们重要的事情：如何修理路由器、何时种植矮牵牛、如何烤巧克力布朗尼。

It is surely a legitimate challenge to instructional design that learners generally prefer formats without it to formats with it, when faced with a real-world task. Give me Google over an e-learning module any day. Instructional design research often repeats Ebbinghaus’s mistake: in trying to determine the best learning formats, it overlooks the fact that in the real world we learn about the things that matter to us: how to fix a router, when to plant petunias, how to bake chocolate brownies.

在实验中，现实世界的现象经常被排除在外，结果就是研究结果只反映了认知过程的细微变化，而完全忽略了真正重要的东西。简而言之：人们倾向于寻找他们想要的证据，但可能会忽略更大的图景。

In experimental contexts, real-world phenomena are often excluded, with the consequence that the findings reflect minor variations in cognitive processes – and completely miss the things that really matter. Put simply: people tend to find the evidence they are looking for, but may miss the bigger picture.

学习研究者通常就像拿着手电筒在黑暗房间的一角研究的人。他们可以告诉你很多关于琐碎事情的信息，但却没有注意到房间中间的桌子、椅子和吊灯。

Learning researchers are often like people studying the corner of a dark room with a torch. They can tell you a lot about little bits of fluff, but have yet to notice the table, chairs and chandelier in the middle of the room.

我们自己的实验中，学生从每一种形式中学习得都一样好，因为他们知道他们将要接受测试——因此，无论采用哪种形式，他们都有动力去获取信息。这个变量——他们的担忧——远远超过了我们正在测试的任何其他内容（例如内容格式的变化）的重要性。我们给了他们一个关注的理由。

The students in our own experiment learned equally well from each of the formats because they knew they were going to be tested – and were therefore motivated to consume the information, whatever the format. This variable – their concern – vastly outweighed the significance of anything else that we were testing, such as variations in content format. We had given them a reason to care.

因此，让我们首先用学习设计模型为学习设计奠定基础。学习设计模型有很多，但只有一种模型反映了情感情境模型所描述的学习现实：推拉谱。

So let’s start by laying the foundations for learning design with a learning design model. There are many models for learning design, but only one that reflects the reality of learning as described by the affective context model: the push–pull spectrum.

正如我上面所说，情感情境模型认为，事实上，我们并没有在记忆中编码“知识”：相反，我们编码了我们对经历的情绪反应模式，并用这些模式在以后重建经历。

As I have stated above, the affective context model proposes that we do not, in fact, encode ‘knowledge’ in our memories: instead we encode the pattern of emotional reactions that we have to experiences, and use these to later reconstruct experiences.

然而，从学习的角度来看，重要的是人们并不是一张白纸：他们对建筑的反应部分是天性，主要还是后天培养。有些人会对其他人甚至没有注意到的建筑感到震惊——被其他人冷漠的古典音乐所感动——或者被其他人无动于衷的艺术作品所震惊。有些人甚至喜欢乡村和西部歌曲。

The important thing from a learning perspective, however, is that people are not blank slates: what they react to is partly nature, and mainly nurture. Some people will be astonished by architecture that others don’t even notice – moved by classical music that leaves others cold – or left speechless by a work of art that leaves others unmoved. Some people even like country and western songs.

因此，学习设计可以牢牢地建立在这个概念基础之上：由于我们的学习受我们的关注点支配，而我们的关注点又决定了某件事对我们有无情感意义，所以在任何情况下，我们要么回应人们已有的关注点（“拉动”），要么试图创造新的关注点（“推动”）。

Learning design can therefore rest soundly on this conceptual foundation: since our learning is governed by our concerns, which in turn determine whether or not something has affective significance for us, in any context we are either responding to the concerns that a person already has (‘pull’), or we are trying to create new concerns (‘push’).

这意味着我们可以进行两大类学习设计：

This means that there are two grand classes of learning design that we can undertake:

1. 拉动。当人们关心某件事时，我们不需要提供情感意义。我们可以简单地提供他们需要的资源。这就是为什么使用 Google 或 YouTube 的人更喜欢纯文本或简单视频的原因——因为他们正在尝试做某事。他们关心的事情。我们的绝大多数学习都是由我们正在尝试做的事情和我们关心的事情驱动的。这就是“拉动”条件。

2. Pull. Where people care about something, we do not need to provide affective significance. We can simply provide the resources they need. This is why plain text or simple video is preferred by people using Google or YouTube – because there is something they are trying to do. Something they care about. The vast majority of our learning is driven by the things we are trying to do, and which we care about. This is the ‘pull’ condition.

3. 推动。当人们对某事漠不关心时，我们需要提供情感意义。我们不能仅仅提供信息并期望学习发生。如果有人对安全不感兴趣，那么提供程序指导将无助于改变他们的行为。如果学生既不关心历史，也不关心他们即将参加的历史考试的结果，那么提供更多的教科书将毫无用处。我们需要提供一种体验，例如挑战、体验或故事，这将为情况增加情感意义。这就是“推动”条件。

4. Push. Where people do not care about something, we need to provide affective significance. We cannot simply provide information and expect learning to take place. If someone is uninterested in safety, then providing procedural guidance will do little to alter their behaviour. If a student cares neither for history nor for the outcome of the history exam they are soon to take, then providing more textbooks will be of little use. We need to provide an experience, such as a challenge, experience or story, that will add affective significance to a situation. This is the ‘push’ condition.

显而易见的是，这两种方法是相辅相成的。例如，如果一个年轻人非常关心某个特定的电脑游戏，他们会很乐意阅读有关游戏策略的百科全书，而不会需要鼓励。关注自己外表的青少年会表现出令人印象深刻的注意力，因为他们会花几个小时学习发型和化妆教程，以达到想要的效果。

It should immediately be obvious that these two approaches go hand in hand. If, for example, a young person cares greatly about a particular computer game, they will quite happily consume encyclopedic tomes on game strategy without the need for encouragement. Teenagers concerned about their appearance will demonstrate impressive attention spans as they sit through hours of hair and makeup tutorials in order to achieve the desired result.

如果我们能让人们关心某件事或其他事情，他们就会利用我们提供的资源（至于他们是否记住则是另一个问题）。因此，学习不是我们“为”人们“做”的事情——我们只是支持它或为它创造条件。

If we can make people care about something or other, they will use the resources we give them (whether or not they commit them to memory is a separate question). Hence the learning is not something we ‘do’ to people – we just support it or create the conditions for it to happen.

这就是为什么，从某种重要意义上来说，不存在“学习者”——因为人们通常只是试图完成某件事，而学习是完成这件事的一种方式。将人们描述为“学习者”有点像将人们描述为“呼吸者”。学习是追求我们关心的事情的副产品。大脑中不存在“学习中心”，也不存在“能力发展中心”，这只是我们用来描述有机体变化方式的一个术语。

This is why, in an important sense, there are no ‘learners’ – because people are generally just trying to get something done, and learning is a way to do that. Describing people as ‘learners’ is a bit like describing people as ‘breathers’. Learning is a by-product of pursuing the things we care about. There is no ‘learning centre’ in the brain any more than there is a ‘capability development centre’, this is just a term we use to describe the way an organism changes.

你可能已经能想象到，现代社会对教育提出了怎样的巨大挑战：一方面，学生越来越沉迷于他们真正关心、渴望学习的大量内容——性、地位、潮流、人际关系、喜剧、震惊和八卦；另一方面，他们又被要求在一个反常的合理化环境中学习，在这个环境中，他们必须反复复习那些对他们来说意义不大甚至毫无意义的信息。很难想象还有比这更极端的心理压力模式——就像在饥饿时给某人喂食丰盛的食物，纯粹是为了加深他们的痛苦。

You can probably already imagine how our modern world presents huge challenges for education: on the one hand, students are increasingly saturated in a hyper-charged diet of things they do care about and are primed to learn – sex, status, trends, relationships, comedy, shock and gossip – on the other, they are expected to function in a perversely rationalized environment where they are required to regurgitate information that has little or no significance to them. It’s hard to imagine a more radical pattern of psychological stress – rather like feeding someone on a rich diet purely to deepen their suffering during starvation.

在正常生活中，我们与世界和他人的互动通常处于“推”与“拉”之间。以对话为例：在良好的对话中，人们在开始时会花一点时间来“建立融洽关系”。这是什么意思？

In normal life, our interactions with the world and with other people are often somewhere in-between ‘push’ and ‘pull’. Take conversation, for example: in a good conversation people take a little time at the outset to ‘establish rapport’. What does this mean?

这意味着人们试图了解对方特别关心的问题，并找到一些共同点。例如，两个人可能一开始会谈论恶劣的天气，然后过一会儿就会发现对食物和当地餐馆的共同热爱。每个人都会从对方那里“拉”来建议。

It means people try to understand what the other person’s particular concerns are and to find some common ground. For example, two people may start out by remarking on the inclement weather, then a little later on discover a shared passion for food and for local restaurants. Each person ‘pulls’ recommendations from the other.

有一次，一个人说当地一家餐馆的鱼很特别，而另一个人则回答说他们不太喜欢鱼。然后他们的谈话对象进入了催促模式：“哦，但你真的必须尝尝安康鱼——我的意思是，如果你还没有尝过，你就错过了最令人难以置信的味道之一！”

At one point, one person remarks that the fish at a local restaurant is exceptional – to which the other responds that they don’t much like fish. Their conversational partner then shifts into push mode: ‘Oh, but you really must try the monkfish – I mean, if you haven’t tried it you are missing out on one of the most incredible flavours!’

现在很明显，一个人试图让另一个人关心他们以前不关心的事情——尝试一些新的东西，改变他们的感受。如果他们已经建立了足够的融洽关系——如果对方现在关心他们的想法——那么这种推动尝试可能会成功。请注意，这与教育应有的方式有多么相似。

It is now clear that one person is trying to make the other care about something that they didn’t before – to try something new, and to change the way they feel. If they have established sufficient rapport – if the other person now cares what they think – then this push attempt might be successful. Notice how similar this is starting to look to the way education should be.

对话确实是学习的一个很好的比喻，因为对话是我们拥有的最古老的学习方法之一。对话首先是讲故事的载体。如果一个人说的话没有让我们感兴趣的东西，那么这不是一次好的对话。如果一个人不花时间去理解我们，只是一直“推销”他们的担忧，那么这个人就很无聊，对话会让人感觉像是在讲课。最后，我们无法与一个和我们一模一样的人进行真正精彩的对话——一开始似乎很舒服，但最终我们渴望不同的视角。

A conversation really is a good metaphor for learning, since a conversation is one of the oldest learning methods we have. Conversation is first and foremost a vehicle for stories. If one person has nothing to say that interests us, then it isn’t a good conversation. If a person takes no time to understand us, and simply ‘pushes’ their concerns the whole time, then that person is a bore and the conversation will feel, literally, like a lecture. Finally, we cannot enjoy a truly great conversation with someone who is exactly like ourselves – it seems comfortable at first, but eventually we crave a different perspective.

从这个角度来看，我们可以理解教练的持久吸引力，教练在人们被问及发展时，总是被列在愿望清单上。教练（或更准确地说是指导）是一种既能提供经验又能提供资源的形式——既能推动又能拉动，这取决于具体情况。有时我们会向教练寻求帮助，有时他们会挑战我们。他们会花时间了解我们的担忧，解决我们关心的问题。

In this light we can make sense of the enduring appeal of coaching, which reliably features on the wish list of people asked about their development. Coaching (or more accurately mentoring) is a format that can be both experience and resource – both push and pull, depending on the circumstance. Sometimes we turn to a coach for help, sometimes they challenge us. They take time to understand our concerns and to address the things that we care about.

可能不太明显的是，这两类学习设计（拉动或推动）都不是教育意义上的“学习”。我的意思是，这两类学习设计的目标都不是为了将知识存储在头脑中。事实上，前者更多是“学习消除”——通过提供资源，我们可以主动减少学习量。

What may not be immediately apparent is that neither of these two classes of learning design – pull or push – is ‘learning’ in the educational sense. What I mean is that neither of these two classes has as their objective that someone should store knowledge in their heads. In fact, the former is more often ‘learning elimination’ – by providing resources we may actively reduce the amount of learning that takes place.

我们稍后会回到这个主题，但首先让我们看一下属于每个类别的一些学习活动的示例。

We will return to this topic later on, but first let’s have a look at some examples of learning activities that fall into each category.

“推动式”学习方法

‘Push’ approaches to learning

首先，如果你想让某人关心他们目前不关心的事情——而且钱不是问题——你会怎么做？

First, if you wanted someone to care about something that they don’t currently care about – and money was no object – how would you do it?

我猜你已经知道答案了。如果我想让你关心欠发达国家的贫困问题，那么带你飞往一个人们生活在贫困线以下的国家，让你与一个孩子因营养不良而死亡的家庭共度一个月——我想这会让你对事情的看法有所不同。

I’m guessing that you already know the answer. If I wanted you to care about poverty in the less developed world, then flying you to a country where people were living below the poverty line, allowing you to spend a month with a family whose children were dying of malnutrition – I imagine that would make you see things differently.

你可能会本能地反对别人把这种“关心”强加给你，但生活有自己的方式转移我们的关注点：那些不太关心疾病的人可能有一天会发现他们或他们的近亲患上了癌症。突然间，他们开始在谷歌上搜索有关癌症的所有信息，并如饥似渴地学习。我们听说有人在与癌症的斗争中幸存下来，并继续创办慈善机构；或者经历了人生观的彻底转变。他们可能是站在我们面前讲述他们的故事的人——有时这让我们很关心。有一天，那个人可能就是我们。

You might instinctively react against the thought of having this kind of ‘concern’ thrust upon you by another person, but life has its own way of shifting our concerns: people who don’t think much about illness may find one day that they, or a close relative, have cancer. Suddenly they are Googling everything there is to know about cancer and learning at a voracious rate. We hear about people who have survived their battle with cancer and gone on to found charities; or to experience a complete transformation of their outlook on life. They might be the person standing before us, telling their story – and sometimes it makes us care. One day that person might be us.

设计体验

Designed experiences

因此，让某人学习（如果他们还不想学习的话）的最有效方法是设计一种体验。创造一个重要的时刻。但什么样的体验呢？人们常说，我们从错误中学到最多。这并不完全正确：人们每天都在犯错误。但他们不会改变。例如，一个人可能一辈子都无法体会他人的感受，成为一个麻木不仁的傻瓜。

So the most effective way to get someone to learn (if they don’t already want to) is by designing an experience. Creating a moment that matters. But what kind of experience? It is often said that we learn most from mistakes. This is not strictly true: people are making mistakes every day, all day long. But they don’t change. A person may spend a lifetime failing to appreciate the feelings of others, being an insensitive twit, for example.

事实上，人们会从自己犯下的错误中吸取教训。羞辱感会让人深感难受。被拒绝会让人痛苦。损失一大笔钱也会让人心痛。如果我们想设计一种体验，比如我们“设计失败”以便让某人学到宝贵的教训，那么我们需要从了解他们真正关心的是什么开始。否则，我们的体验很有可能不会产生影响——或者影响太大！

In fact, people learn from the mistakes that they suffer from. Humiliation is deeply felt. Rejection is painful. Losing a lot of money stings. If we want to design an experience, for example in which we ‘engineer failure’ in order that someone can learn a valuable lesson, then we need to start by understanding what they really care about. Otherwise, there is a good chance that our experience will have no impact – or have too much impact!

同样，一次深刻的经历，比如亲身经历极端贫困，不一定是犯错的经历。重要的是它在情感层面上影响了我们——否则我们在经历之后不会比以前更在意。但我们如何知道什么会对某人产生影响，什么不会呢？

Equally, a powerful experience, such as first-hand experience of extreme poverty, does not need to be an experience of making a mistake. What matters is that it impacts us at an emotional level – otherwise we won’t care any more after an experience than we did before. But how do we know what will impact someone and what won’t?

如果是你，我会如何设计一种能够真正改变你对事物的看法的体验？

If it were you, how would I design an experience that would truly transform the way you feel about things?

答案有两个：我可以设计出一种体验，让任何经历过的人都发生改变——仅仅因为他们是人。例如，对于大多数人来说，做出生死攸关的决定都是相当有影响的。或者，更有建设性的是，我可以找出对你来说重要的事情，并以此为基础进行设计。

There are two answers: I could design the kind of experience that would transform anyone that went through it – just by virtue of them being human. Having to make life-and-death decisions is pretty impactful for most people, for example. Or, more constructively, I could find out about what matters to you, and base my designs on that.

后一点是一个中心主题，并且会一次又一次地出现：如果不了解你为之设计学习体验的人，你就无法设计出有效的学习体验。

This latter point is a central theme and will come up time and time again: you cannot design effective learning experiences without understanding the people for whom you are designing them.

虽然这听起来像是常识，但这是当今学习设计的最大错误——即我们专注于定义我们希望人们记住的内容/主题以及我们将使用什么机制来传达给他们，而不是分析相关受众的关注点和背景。我们假设知识可以以某种方式注入人们的心中，就像水注入烧杯一样——但实际上，知识是由个人关注点编织而成的织物。

While this might sound like common sense, it is the single greatest mistake in learning design today – namely, we focus on defining the content/topics that we want people to memorize and the mechanism that we will use to get it to them, instead of analysing the concerns and context of the audience in question. We assume that knowledge can somehow be decanted into people like water into a beaker – when in reality it is a fabric woven from the threads of an individual’s concerns.

我们需要从内容转向情境。因此，我将这种传统的学习方法称为“内容倾销”。

We need to shift from content to context. For this reason, I will call this conventional approach to learning ‘content dumping’.

内容倾倒是我们在课堂上对孩子和参加组织学习计划的成年人所做的大部分工作——我们选择一些我们希望他们知道的“主题”，向他们灌输知识，希望他们能记住其中的一些内容。但效果甚微，更不用说转化为行为或能力的改变——但我们继续这样做，因为我们不知道还能做什么，我们沉迷于将学习视为知识转移，将人视为一张白纸的想法。

Content dumping is the greater part of what we do to children in classrooms, and to adults enrolled in organizational learning programmes – we take some ‘topics’ that we would like them to know about as we spray them with knowledge in the hope that some of it sticks. Very little does, and still less translates into behavioural or capability change – but we carry on because we don’t know what else to do, and we are hooked on the idea of learning as knowledge transfer, and of people as blank slates.

我可以自信地预测，当我们确实进行“内容倾销”时，那些小棍子往往会是与某人关心的内容相关的信息（即使这个人恰好是老师）——但不言而喻，无论是在学校还是在工作场所，这种“散弹枪式”教育方式都是极其低效的。

What I can confidently predict is that when we do engage in ‘content dumping’, what little sticks will tend to be that information that relates to something someone cares about (even if that just happens to be the instructor) – but it goes without saying that such a ‘shotgun’ approach to education, whether in school or in the workplace, is grossly inefficient.

我将在后面的章节中更多地讨论设计体验，但首先我想描述一些替代方案，然后再深入细节。

I will talk more about designing experiences in a later chapter, but first I’d like to describe some of the alternatives before diving into the detail.

体验作为一种学习方式的有效性使得一些人拥护“边做边学”作为学习设计的权威方法。虽然亲身体验确实是一种有效的学习方式，但它的效力归功于学习的真正基础：通过感觉学习。

The effectiveness of experiences as a means to learn has led some to champion ‘learning by doing’ as the definitive approach to learning design. While first-hand experience is indeed a powerful way to learn, it owes its potency to the true basis of learning: learning by feeling.

这听起来可能有点奇怪——直到你意识到讲故事和观察也是有效的学习方式。一个孩子看到他的朋友掉进火里，可以从她父母的尖叫和惊慌的反应判断掉进火里是一件坏事——而实际上他自己并不需要这样做。同样，我们可以听一个关于某人掉进火里的故事，并学会不要自己这样做。

This might sound like an odd thing to say – until you realize that storytelling and observation are also effective ways to learn. A child who sees his friend fall into a fire can judge from the screaming and panicked reaction of her parents that falling into a fire is a bad thing – without actually having to do it themselves. Equally, we can hear a story about someone who fell into a fire and learn not to do it ourselves.

讲故事和观察

Storytelling and observation

由于观察和讲故事不需要太多“做”，很明显，所有这些机制的共同点在于它们的情感元素。当我们为自己做某事时，情感影响是直接的和个人的，因此“边做边学”具有特殊的吸引力——但任何改变我们感受的形式都可能带来学习。

Since observation and storytelling don’t involve much ‘doing’, it is clear that what all these mechanisms have in common is their affective elements. When we do something for ourselves, the emotional impact is first-hand and personal, hence ‘learning by doing’ has a special appeal – but any format that changes how we feel can result in learning.

事实上，我们并不总是能够让人们亲身体验事物。这可能是因为成本太高、风险太大，或者组织起来太困难。例子包括“被熊袭击”到“发动机故障”。

In reality, we aren’t always able to give people first-hand experience of things. That may be because it is too costly, too risky, or simply too difficult to organize. Examples range from ‘being attacked by a bear’ to ‘engine failure’.

在这种情况下，我们可能会用讲故事来传递重要的教训。人类是讲故事的人——这句话既指故事跨越时间和文化的持久吸引力，也指讲故事在日常生活中发挥的重要作用。我们不仅蜂拥到电影院看故事，我们还把大部分的谈话时间都花在分享故事上。我们称之为“八卦”。

In such cases we may use storytelling to pass on important lessons. Human beings are storytellers – a statement that refers to both the enduring appeal of stories across time and cultures, and the significant role that storytelling plays in everyday life. Not only do we flock to cinemas to watch stories, we spend the greater part of our conversational time sharing stories. We call it ‘gossip’.

故事很重要，因为它们反映了我们自然地分享和编码记忆的方式。当某件事发生在我们身上时，它会产生情绪反应。这些情绪反应会被储存起来。如果这件事足够重要，我们很可能会尝试与其他人分享——分享好故事具有相当大的社会价值。

Stories are important because they reflect the way in which we naturally share and encode memories. When something happens to us, it creates an emotional reaction. These emotional reactions are what get stored. If the event was significant enough, we will likely try to share it with other people – there is considerable social value attached to sharing good stories.

我们这样做的方式是使用文字，文字是总结我们体验到的感受的一种方式。然而，故事的好坏取决于它的情感维度；一个完全枯燥的故事，例如我们如何在周末完成一堆洗衣服的故事，根本不能算作一个故事。

The way that we do this is to use words, which are a method for summarizing the feelings we experienced. A story is only as good as its affective dimension, however; a completely dull story, for example of how we completed a load of washing at the weekend, is not considered a story at all.

事实上，如果有人开始给你讲洗衣服的故事，你会立刻想象到将会发生一些意想不到或令人惊讶的事情（“然后我意识到猫在洗衣机里！”）——简直无法想象有人会说：“40 分钟后洗好了衣服”（故事结束）。以至于如果有人真的这样做了，它本身就会成为一个故事，因为它是如此离奇。

In fact, if someone did start telling you a story about doing a load of washing, you would instantly imagine that there is going to be something unexpected or surprising (‘and then I realized that the cat was in the washing machine!’) – it’s simply inconceivable that someone would say: ‘And 40 minutes later the washing was done’ (end of story). So much so that if someone actually did this it would become a story in its own right, by virtue of being so bizarre.

我们的话语发挥着重要的作用——因为我们在共同的文化中长大，我们的话语在听众心中引发了相似的情感。听众现在已经“记住”了这个故事，并能够自己讲述它（尽管，正如巴特利特发现的那样，当他们重新创作这个故事时，他们可能会对它进行微妙的修改，以反映他们自己的担忧）。

Our words serve an important purpose – because we have grown up in a shared culture, our words create similar sets of emotions in the listener. The listener has now ‘remembered’ the story and is able to tell it themselves (although, as Bartlett discovered, when they recreate the story they will likely alter it subtly to reflect their own concerns).

所以我们喜欢听故事。学习活动的人们稍后会在酒吧里交换故事。如果故事足够精彩，晚宴演讲者可以靠讲故事谋生。人们会讲述他们与疾病作斗争、参战、独自航行大西洋的经历。

So we like to hear stories. People at learning events will swap stories at the bar later. After-dinner speakers can make a living out of telling stories, if their story is sufficiently exciting. People will tell stories of their experience of battling illness, of going to war, of sailing the Atlantic Ocean single-handed.

一个人也可以成为一个优秀的讲故事的人。什么是优秀的讲故事的人？懂得如何有力地表达情感并与观众产生共鸣的人。一个糟糕的讲故事的人会把一个好故事讲得无聊透顶。

One can also be a good storyteller. What is a good storyteller? Someone who knows how to express emotions powerfully, and connect to their audience. A bad storyteller can take a great story and make it feel boring.

然而，在教育环境中，故事因“学习就是知识转移”这一腐化观念而遭受严重损害。在实践中，这意味着所谓的“主题专家”会试图告诉你他们学到了什么，而不是他们如何学到的，因为他们被误导认为“学习点”是需要转移到你头脑中的东西。

In an educational setting, however, stories have suffered terribly from the corrupting idea that learning is knowledge transfer. In practice this means that so-called ‘subject matter experts’ will try to tell you what they learned, rather than how they learned it, because they have been misled into thinking that the ‘learning point’ is what needs to be transferred into your head.

把摄像机对准安全专家，请他们谈论安全问题，他们往往会说：“安全非常重要”，或者“你必须始终这样做”。他们往往不会告诉你为什么安全很重要，或者为什么你必须始终这样做。让他们说出“嗯，当我刚开始我的职业生涯时……”或“有一次我们在研究这台设备……”往往非常困难。这都是因为我们固执地认为大脑储存信息，而信息传递就是学习的全部内容。

Point a camera at a safety expert and ask them to talk about safety, and they will tend to say things like: ‘Safety is very important’, or ‘You must always do such-and-such’. What they tend not to tell you is why safety is important, or why you must always do such-and-such. It is often quite arduous to get them to a place where they can say: ‘Well, when I was first starting out in my career…’, or ‘This one time we were working on this piece of equipment and…’. This is all because we have become fixated on the idea that brains store information, and information transfer is what learning is all about.

再次，我们应该讲什么故事？答案：对人们重要的故事。我们如何知道什么故事对人们重要？找出他们关心的是什么。

Once again, what stories should one tell? Answer: stories that matter to people. How do we know what stories matter to people? Find out what they care about.

如果我们正在考虑设计一种学习体验，这是开始设计过程的最佳方式之一：问问自己：“人们会讲述关于这种体验的什么故事？”停下来想想这个想法与传统教育有多么格格不入：你能想象，教育者不是在课程计划中描述要涵盖的主题，而是在思考学生会讲述什么故事吗？我最小的女儿讲的故事之一是他们被带到当地博物馆并被允许试穿复古服装的那一天。这是她记得的少数几件事之一。

If we are thinking about designing a learning experience, this is one of the best ways to start the design process: ask yourself: ‘What story will people tell about this experience?’ Pause to consider how alien that idea is to conventional education: can you imagine that instead of lesson plans describing the topics to be covered, an educator wonders what story the students will tell? One of the stories my youngest daughter tells is of the day they were taken to a local museum and allowed to try on vintage clothing. It’s one of the few things she remembers.

当你听别人讲故事时，你会注意到一些有趣的主题。例如，人们经常会谈论与名人见面的情况——名人说的话往往会对个人产生重大影响。他们会说这样的话：“我曾经见过穆罕默德·阿里。他握着我的手，我问他秘诀是什么，他说‘不是你挥拳的速度有多快，而是你移动脚步的速度有多快。’这个建议就是我今天经营生意的方式。” ³

When you listen to the stories that people tell, you will notice interesting themes. As an example, people will often talk about meeting famous people – and often the things that the famous person had to say will have a big impact on the individual. They will say things like: ‘I once met Muhammad Ali. He shook my hand and I asked him what his secret was, and he said “It’s not how fast you move your fists, but how fast you move your feet.” That advice is how I run my business today.’³

当你听到这样的事情时，你很容易会想，为什么这些遭遇如此令人难忘——为什么在电视上看到同一个人说同样的话，或者从一个普通人那里得到同样的建议，却不那么令人难忘。我们的知识传递模型无法解释这一点：无论信息来自谁，信息都是相同的。计算机不会根据输入信息的人是否是名人而以不同的方式存储信息。

When you hear things like this, it is easy to wonder why these encounters are so memorable – why it isn’t nearly as memorable to watch the same person say the same thing on TV, or to have the same advice imparted by a non-famous person. Our knowledge transfer model can’t explain that: the information is the same regardless of from whom it comes. Computers do not store information differently based on whether the person typing it in is a celebrity.

我曾经在一家大型电信公司工作，该公司的首席执行官坚持参加每一次员工入职培训，并回答员工的问题新员工向他提出的问题。但随着组织的发展，决定 CEO 不再能够参加这些会议，而是让人们可以从一系列预先录制的视频中选择 CEO 回答常见问题的视频。

I once worked for a large telecommunications organization, whose CEO made a point of attending every staff induction session and answering questions put to him by new starters. But as the organization grew, a decision was made that the CEO would no longer be able to attend these sessions and instead people would be able to choose from a number of pre-recorded videos of the CEO responding to frequently asked questions.

从直觉上看，你可能感觉到这是倒退——但具体为什么呢？让 CEO 回答常见问题显然比事先准备好的演讲要好（因为至少一些回答会解决人们的疑虑），而且从知识传递的角度来看，两者涵盖的“学习目标”是相同的。那么，为什么这是一种非常不同的学习体验呢？

At an intuitive level, you can probably sense that this is a step backwards – but why exactly? Having the CEO answer frequently asked questions is clearly better than a pre-prepared speech (since at least some of the responses will address the concerns people have), and from a knowledge-transfer perspective the same ‘learning objectives’ are covered. So why is it a very different learning experience?

地位密集的情况

Status-dense situations

想象一下，如果你要选择参加纳尔逊·曼德拉的演讲，或者参加你的培训团队成员关于纳尔逊·曼德拉生平的演讲。你会选择哪一个？

Imagine that you are given a choice between attending a talk given by Nelson Mandela, and a talk given by one of your training team about the life of Nelson Mandela. Which would you prefer?

为了理解这些情况，我们需要知道人类既是社会动物又是等级动物。名人和其他重要人物（如首席执行官）地位很高。因此，与他们的任何接触都是我所说的“地位密集”的情况。由于他们的地位，你与他们的互动在社交意义上是高风险的。

In order to understand these situations, we need to know that humans are both social and hierarchical creatures. Celebrities and other important people (such as chief executive officers) are held in high standing. For this reason, any encounter with them is what I will call a ‘status-dense’ situation. Because of their status, your interaction with them is high stakes in a social sense.

这就像攀登悬崖：如果你的互动进展不顺利，你就有可能蒙受耻辱和公众羞辱。如果进展顺利，你的自尊和声誉就会突然提升。因为这些都是情绪激动的情况，它们会在我们的记忆中停留很长时间——并且在复述中不断成长！

It is like scaling a cliff: if your interaction goes poorly, you risk ignominy and public shame. If it goes well, your self-esteem and reputation enjoy a sudden boost. Because these are highly emotional situations, they remain in our memories a long while – and grow in the retelling!

这或许有助于我们理解师生关系的另一个方面：如果教师的角色（以及教师本身）受到钦佩和尊重，他们就更容易影响学生的记忆。关心学生的教师能带来更好的教育成果。4^但学生也应该关心他们的老师：如果教师这个职业声誉受损，他们的效率也会受到影响。

This may help us to understand another aspect of the teacher–student relationship: if the role of teacher (and the teacher themselves) is admired and respected, they can more easily influence the memory of students. Teachers who care deliver better educational outcomes.⁴ But students should also care about their teachers: if the profession falls into disrepute, their effectiveness suffers too.

在会议演讲开始时，演讲者通常会花很多时间来讲述自己的经历、成就、资历、出版物，以确立自己的合法性——为什么？这为什么很重要？

At the start of conference speeches, speakers will often spend quite a bit of time establishing their legitimacy by talking about their experiences, their accomplishments, their qualifications, their publications – why? Why should it matter?

因为社会地位会影响我们编码信息的方式。有时我们会邀请名人或运动员谈论他们几乎一无所知的事情——教育、政治、领导力——原因很简单，他们的地位让他们说的话令人难忘。

Because social status impacts how we encode information. Sometimes we will invite celebrities or sportspeople to talk about things they know next to nothing about – education, politics, leadership – for the simple reason that their status makes what they have to say memorable.

更合理的是，培训师拥有丰富的工作经验（或从培训岗位轮换到实践岗位）通常很有帮助，这样才能赢得组织学习者的尊重。例如，如果领导力培训师从未担任过领导者，就很难被认真对待。

More legitimately, it is often helpful for trainers to have significant experience of the job – or to rotate from training to practical roles – in order to retain the respect of organizational learners. It’s hard to take a leadership trainer seriously, for example, if they have never been a leader.

从学习设计的角度来看，我们可以设计“地位密集”的情况来提高学习效果——例如，如果人们面临发展挑战，最终向“董事会”或当地名人展示他们的工作，这会对人们的学习产生很大的影响。

From a learning design standpoint we can engineer ‘status-dense’ situations in the interests of improving learning – for example, if people are set a developmental challenge that culminates in a presentation of their work to the ‘board of directors’ or to a local celebrity, this can make quite a difference to what people learn.

正规教育有时会产生类似的情况，例如毕业典礼，父母在场见证学生取得的成就。

Formal education will sometimes create similar situations, for example graduation ceremonies where parents are present to witness the culmination of one’s accomplishments.

模拟

Simulation

1968 年 4 月 4 日晚上，简·埃利奥特 (Jane Elliott) 是美国小镇兰德尔一所只有一间教室的学校的老师，她正在熨烫帐篷，这时她打开电视，得知马丁·路德·金被暗杀的消息。5^她正在熨烫帐篷，为北美印第安人的课程做准备，但她担心，除非她的孩子亲身经历歧视，否则他们不会真正理解歧视。她想起了苏族人的祈祷：“哦，伟大的精神，让我永远不要评判一个人，直到我穿上他的鹿皮鞋。”

On the evening of 4 April 1968, Jane Elliott, a teacher in a one-room school in the small US town of Randall, was ironing a tepee when she turned on the TV and learned that Martin Luther King had been assassinated.⁵ She was ironing the tepee in preparation for a lesson about North American Indians, but she was troubled by the suspicion that her children wouldn’t really understand discrimination unless they experienced it for themselves. She was reminded of the Sioux prayer: ‘Oh great spirit, keep me from ever judging a man until I have walked in his moccasins.’

所以第二天，她决定做点不同的事情。她和小学班的同学们谈论马丁·路德·金遇刺事件，然后问学生们是否想感受一下歧视是什么感觉。学生们同意了。

So the next day, she decided to do something different. She talked with her elementary class about the assassination of Martin Luther King, and then asked her pupils if they would like to feel what discrimination was like. They agreed.

于是她根据眼睛的颜色给班级分配班级。她告诉大家，蓝眼睛的孩子更优秀。他们坐在前面，并给棕色眼睛的孩子戴上布项圈，以便更容易区分他们。蓝眼睛的孩子获得了额外的特权——午餐可以吃第二份，可以使用新的攀爬架，有更多的玩耍时间——但他们不被鼓励与棕色眼睛的孩子交往。

So she divided the class according to eye colour. Blue-eyed children, she told the group, were superior. They sat at the front, and they got to place fabric collars around the necks of the brown-eyed children so as to more easily distinguish them. The blue-eyed children received extra privileges – second helpings at lunch, access to the new jungle gym, more play time – and they were discouraged from fraternizing with the brown-eyed children.

蓝眼睛的孩子很快就表现出一种优越感，而棕色眼睛的孩子则变得胆怯和孤僻，喜欢在课间休息时把自己孤立起来。在一天的时间里，蓝眼睛组的学习成绩提高了，而棕色眼睛组的学习成绩却下降了。第二天，她又进行了一次逆转实验。

The blue-eyed children quickly adopted an air of superiority, while the brown-eyed children became timid and withdrawn, preferring to isolate themselves during recess. In the space of a single day, academic performance improved for the blue-eyed group, just as it deteriorated for the brown-eyed children. The following day she reversed the experiment.

据说，这个实验对孩子们产生了深远的影响，尽管它并不一定让简在当地社区受欢迎。她继续重复她的实验，多年后，她的许多学生都会回忆起他们学到的教训。

By all accounts the experiment had a profound effect on the children, though it didn’t necessarily make Jane popular in her local community. She went on to repeat her experiment, and years later many of her students would recall the lesson they learned.

这种“推动”方法就是模拟。模拟用于创建一个操作和感觉都像真实事物的环境，以便人们学习。模拟环境可以像艰难对话的角色扮演一样简单，也可以像飞行模拟器一样复杂。

This kind of ‘push’ approach is simulation. Simulation is used to create an environment that operates and feels like the real thing, so that people can learn. A simulated environment can be as simple as a role-play of a difficult conversation or as complex as a flight simulator.

人们有时会错误地认为模拟器只是看起来或功能上与真实的东西相似而已——但关键在于，它们在情感上是相似的。我曾经参加过一门培训课程，培训对象是打算前往海上钻井设施的人。由于这些旅程通常需要乘坐直升机，并且有可能在海上迫降，所以培训内容包括从直升机机身逃生。好几次。倒着。穿着大量的装备，坐在人力资源总监旁边。

People sometimes make the mistake of assuming that a simulator is something that merely looks or functions like the real thing – but the critical thing is that it is affectively similar. I once completed a training course for people intending to travel to offshore drilling installations. Since these journeys typically involve a helicopter ride and the possibility of ditching in the sea, the training involved escaping from a helicopter fuselage. Several times. Upside-down. Wearing copious amounts of gear and sitting next to the HR director.

当然，如今在虚拟现实 (VR) 中重现这种体验可能更容易——现代游戏技术提供了非常高的精确度——但我可以向你保证，这种感觉与真实情况完全不同：迷失方向，当你屏住呼吸，努力系好安全带时，恐慌感会不断增加，戴着厚厚手套的手在努力操作机械装置。如果一种情况具有重要的情感维度，那么在模拟中忽略这一点可能会让这种体验几乎毫无用处。

Today, of course, it might be easier to recreate this experience in virtual reality (VR) – with modern games technology providing a very high degree of accuracy – but I can assure you that this would feel nothing like the real thing: the disorientation, the rising sense of panic as you grapple with the seat-belt while holding your breath, heavily gloved hands struggling with the mechanism. If there is a significant affective dimension to a situation, overlooking this in the simulation can render the experience near-useless.

这让我们清楚地了解了哪些事情可以合法地在计算机上模拟：例如，如果你试图模拟的是“完成预算电子表格”，那么计算机模拟可能效果很好，因为真实活动和模拟活动感觉非常相似。但我们应该对计算机模拟领导力持怀疑态度——当然，除非你领导的团队完全是虚拟的。

This gives us a fair idea of the sorts of things that we can legitimately simulate on a computer: if, for example the thing you are trying to simulate is ‘completing a budget spreadsheet’, then a computer simulation will probably work well, since the real activity and the simulated one feel very similar. But we should be sceptical of a computer simulation of leadership – unless, of course, the team you are leading are entirely virtual.

最后，这就是为什么 VR 是一种很有前途的学习技术——VR 的强大之处恰恰在于它让你“感觉”自己就在那里，它极大地扩展了我们模拟现实中事物感觉的能力。

Finally, this is why VR is a promising learning technology – the power of VR is precisely that it ‘feels’ as though you are there, and it greatly extends our ability to simulate how things would feel in reality.

到目前为止，我一直在谈论“推动式”学习，以及我们可以使人们体验到的事物对他们有意义的所有方法，以便他们以后能够（在某种程度上）重建它们。当然，所有这些方法的共同点是情感意义。我们记住我们关心的东西。

So far I have been talking about ‘push’ learning and all the ways in which we can make things that people experience meaningful for them, so that they will be able to reconstruct them (to some extent) later. The thing that all these approaches have in common is, of course, affective significance. We remember what we care about.

基于焦虑的学习

Anxiety-based learning

但假设你有一些非常无趣的信息——你知道人们不关心这些信息——而你想以某种方式强迫人们记住这些信息。你会怎么做呢？

But say you had some really dull information – information that you know people don’t care about – and you wanted to force it into people’s heads somehow. How might you do that?

一种显而易见的方法可能是用枪指着他们的头，或者威胁要伤害他们关心的人。这有什么用呢？这些威胁可能会让个人感到焦虑，而这种焦虑会为这些信息提供情感意义。

One obvious approach might be to hold a gun to their head, or threaten to injure someone they care about. How would this help? Well, these kinds of threats would likely generate anxiety in the individual, and this anxiety would provide affective significance for the information.

如果我回想起来，我仍然能记得预科学校的拉丁语老师那张红彤彤的脸，离我只有几英寸远；他的嘴唇上沾着唾沫，脖子上的青筋暴起，他尖叫着对我说我不知道​​拉丁语“战争”这个词的变格。

If I think back, I can still remember the bright-red face of my prep-school Latin teacher, inches from mine; small flecks of spittle on his lips as the veins in his neck bulged and he shrieked at me for not knowing the declensions of the Latin word ‘war’.

“ Bellum, belli, bello, bellorum, bellis, bella。”直到今天，我还记得那间橡木镶板房间的角落，我被要求站在那里，直到我能准确地背诵这句话。如果这所学校还在，我可以带你去那里，指给你看。

‘Bellum, belli, bello, bellorum, bellis, bella.’ To this day, I remember the corner of the oak-panelled room in which I was made to stand until I could recite it accurately. In the event that the school is still standing, I could take you there and point it out.

我将这种方法称为“基于焦虑”的学习，不幸的是，它充斥着我们的教育体系。事实上，这是教育采用的主导机制。如今，许多国家都认为在学校使用体罚是不可接受的，所以我们转而采用测试。测试之所以有效，只是因为它是一种创造人为焦虑的方式，这种焦虑是那些原本不重要的信息的情感背景。测试是一种威胁。

This kind of approach I will call ‘anxiety-based’ learning and, sadly, it pervades our education system. Indeed, it is the dominant mechanism that education employs. These days it is not deemed acceptable in many countries to use corporal punishment in schools, so instead we have resorted to testing. Testing works only because it is a way of creating a kind of artificial anxiety, which serves as the affective context for otherwise unimportant information. A test is a kind of threat.

因此，现代教育（很大程度上）包括一系列令人焦虑的考试，为了应对考试，我们试图将尽可能多的信息塞进我们的大脑。焦虑源于这样一个神话：我们未来的成功取决于我们在这些考试中的表现。显然，如果社会和家长合谋维持这一神话，和谐地制造这样的印象，即如果你没有通过各种考试，你最终将在生产线上工作，砍掉鱼头，这很有帮助。

As a result, modern education (largely) comprises a series of anxiety-driven tests, in service of which we try to cram as much information into our heads as possible. The anxiety stems from the myth that our future success depends on our performance on these tests. Obviously it helps if society and parents collude in sustaining this myth, working in harmony to create the impression that if you don’t pass various tests, you will end up working on a production line, chopping the heads off fish.

在某种程度上，这曾经是真的——曾经存在一种“证书换现金”的经济，雇主会根据你从一所知名大学获得的历史学位为你提供人力资源工作——即使你已经忘记了几乎所有的东西，而且这个学位与你的工作毫无关系——而这个系统的捍卫者会指出，拥有学位的人平均比没有学位的人挣得更多。6^今天，一些公司（如谷歌）开始明确认识到这一切是多么荒谬。

To some extent this used to be true – there existed a kind of ‘cash for certificates’ economy in which employers would offer you an HR job on the basis that you got a history degree from a reputable university – even though you had forgotten almost everything and the degree bore no relation to your work – and defenders of the system will point to the fact that people with degrees earn, on average, more than those without them.⁶ Today, some companies (such as Google) are beginning to explicitly recognize how ridiculous this all is.

过度依赖基于焦虑的学习正将教育推向危机：一方面，大概是出于纯粹的智力匮乏，政府越来越重视考试，迫使考试年龄范围进一步降低，以期在日益公开的国际考试对比（如 PISA 排名）中提高排名。虽然这符合政治议程，并为测试公司带来商业机会，但对学习者和企业却不利。

The overdependence on anxiety-based learning is driving education to the point of crisis: on the one hand, presumably out of sheer intellectual bankruptcy, governments are placing more and more emphasis on tests, forcing them further down the age range in an attempt to bolster their standings on increasingly publicized international test comparisons (such as the PISA rankings). While this serves political agendas and brings commercial opportunity for testing companies, it is to the detriment of learners and businesses.

为什么会这样？基于焦虑的推送内容方法有负面副作用。其中最具破坏性的是它们在学习和焦虑之间建立了深刻的联系。如果一个人的学习经历是它通常包括一项挑战，你需要记住信息才能通过考试——而且考试很可能是竞争性的，对你的自尊、声誉和未来前景有很大的潜在风险——那么大多数人都会认为学习是一件坏事。

How so? Anxiety-based methods of pushing content have negative side effects. The most damaging of these is that they create a deep association between learning and anxiety. If a person’s experience of learning is that it typically comprises a challenge in which you are required to memorize information so that you can pass a test – and that the test is likely to be competitive, with significant potential risk to your self-esteem, reputation and future prospects – then the majority of people will learn that learning is a negative thing.

这一点很明显，当你让经历过这种体验的成年人建议他们进行一些“学习”时，他们会立即将其解释为“教育”，并问：“会有考试吗？”当你说“不会”时，你可以看到他们脸上的轻松表情，他们脑海里有一个声音说：“太好了！所以我不需要记住这些了。”这怎么会是好事呢？

This is quite evident when you take adults who have been through this experience and propose that they do some ‘learning’; they immediately interpret this as meaning ‘education’ and ask: ‘Will there be a test?’ You can see the relief on their faces when you say: ‘No’, and a voice in their head says: ‘Great! So I don’t have to remember any of this.’ How can this be a good thing?

有很多理由避免将测试作为学习设计方法，但我们将在教育章节中回顾这些理由。

There are a great many reasons to avoid the test as a learning design approach – but we will return to these in the chapter on education.

行为矫正

Behaviour modification

这里还有另一个学习挑战：如果你想训练你的狗去捡一根棍子，你会怎么做？我怀疑学校测试的爱好者更有可能建议使用电击——但我猜大多数人会建议使用类似狗食或更经济的“好狗！”的方法。

Here’s another learning challenge: if you wanted to train your dog to fetch a stick, how might you do that? I have a suspicion that devotees of testing in schools would be more likely to suggest electric shocks – but I would guess that most people would suggest something along the lines of dog treats or the more economical ‘Good dog!’ approach.

虽然您可能不知道自己所应用的具体原理，但您可能会有兴趣知道，您的方法被 20 世纪 70 年代研究改变行为方法的心理学家称为“操作性条件反射”。

While you may not be aware of the exact principles that you are applying, you may be interested to know that your approach was called ‘operant conditioning’ by psychologists who investigated ways of modifying behaviour in the 1970s.

最常被誉为操作性条件反射之父的人是伯勒斯·弗雷德里克·斯金纳，他后来成为哈佛大学教授。他最著名的成就或许是发明了斯金纳箱。斯金纳箱盒子是一个腔室，通常大小与一个大纸箱相当，除了实验者希望控制的东西之外，其中可以移除所有干扰。

The man who is most often credited as the father of operant conditioning is Burrhus Frederic Skinner, who went on to become a Harvard professor. He is perhaps most famous for the invention of the Skinner box. The Skinner box is a chamber, typically about the size of a large cardboard box, in which all distractions can be removed except for the things the experimenter wishes to control.

如果你是一只老鼠——或者一只鸽子——被放在斯金纳箱里，你可能会发现一个杠杆和一盏灯。按下杠杆可能会导致食物颗粒被分配，或者地板带电。通过这种方式，可以排除所有刺激和所有行为，除了正在调查的行为，并观察一个行为如何影响另一个行为。

If you were a rat – or a pigeon – placed in a Skinner box, you might find a lever and a light. Pressing the lever might cause a food pellet to be dispensed, or the floor to become electrified. In this way it was possible to exclude all stimuli and all behaviours except the ones being investigated, and see how one affected the other.

斯金纳还发明了一种类似的东西，叫做“教学机器”。教学机器的工作原理有点像斯金纳箱，学习者只会看到他们应该学习的信息，然后他们必须给出正确的回答。如果他们给出了正确的回答，他们会得到奖励；如果没有，他们会重复练习，直到他们答对为止。因此，例如，你可能会得到一个节奏来重现（通过按下杠杆），当你正确地重现它时，你就可以继续下一个练习。

Skinner also invented something similar called the ‘teaching machine’. The teaching machine worked a bit like the Skinner box in that the learner would see just the information they were supposed to learn, then they would have to give the correct response. If they gave the correct response they would be rewarded; if not they would repeat the exercise until they got it right. So, for example, you might be given a rhythm to reproduce (by pressing a lever) and when you correctly reproduced it you could move on to the next exercise.

由于重视行为，斯金纳等心理学家被称为“行为主义者”。从某种程度上说，这一运动是对心理分析学的反抗——心理分析学是荣格和弗洛伊德开创的一种方法，它非常重视心​​灵的内部运作，尤其是潜意识。心理学当时还相对较新，难以被接受为一门科学，而有些人，比如行为主义者，对所有无法衡量的心理事物感到非常不安。“让我们只关注行为吧，”他们说：“我们可以衡量它。一切都将非常科学。”事情就是这样。

Because of the emphasis they placed on behaviour, psychologists like Skinner were called ‘behaviourists’. In part, the movement was a reaction against psychoanalysis – the approach pioneered by Jung and Freud, which placed great importance on the inner workings of the mind and in particular the unconscious. Psychology was still relatively new and struggling to gain acceptability as a science, and some people, such as the behaviourists, were really uneasy about all the mental stuff that couldn’t be measured. ‘Let’s just focus on behaviour,’ they said: ‘We can measure that. It will all be very scientific.’ And so it was.

他们有了重大发现：他们发现，你可以用一只智力相当高的动物，比如狗、老鼠或鸽子，通过条件反射让它做几乎任何你想让它做的事情。我所说的条件反射类型称为操作性条件反射，如上所述。7^操作性条件反射的工作方式如下：一个生物做了某件事（通常只是通过反复试验），结果会发生以下三种情况之一：发生坏事、发生好事、什么也没发生。

They made important discoveries: they found that you could take a reasonably intelligent animal, such as a dog or rat – or pigeon – and get it to do pretty much anything you wanted through conditioning. The kind of conditioning I am talking about is called operant conditioning, as mentioned above.⁷ Operant conditioning works in the following way: a creature does something (usually just through trial and error) and one of three things happens as a result: something bad happens, something good happens, nothing happens.

例如，一只老鼠可能会在笼子里乱逛，直到它不小心按到了杠杆——这时就会分发一粒食物。一只狗可能会发现，每当它穿过房间的一侧时，它就会受到电击。剩下的你就能猜到了——老鼠学会了按杠杆，狗学会了不穿过房间的一侧。

For example, a rat might bumble around a cage until it accidentally presses a lever – at which point a pellet of food is dispensed. A dog might find that every time it crosses over to one side of the room it receives an electric shock. You can guess the rest – rats learn to press levers, dogs learn not to cross over to one side of the room.

操作性条件反射是一种塑造大量行为的极其有效的方法，因为人类与其他动物并无太大差异，反应方式也类似。例如，它可以帮助解释成瘾：最有效的奖励“计划”是不可预测的——你永远不确定下一次按下控制杆是否会给你食物颗粒。这可以让我们理解为什么人们会沉迷于赌博，或者留在虐待关系中。

Operant conditioning is a tremendously powerful way to shape a host of behaviours since human beings are not so different from other animals and respond in a similar fashion. For example, it can help explain addiction: the most powerful ‘schedule’ of rewards is one that is unpredictable – you are never quite sure if the next press of the lever will be the one that gets you the food pellet. This can enable us to understand why people become addicted to gambling, or stay in abusive relationships.

它在教育和消费者行为领域也有明显的应用。事实证明，动物不仅能学会对奖励感到高兴，还能学会对“代表”奖励的东西感到高兴——例如金星或积分。当父母愿意为孩子在考试中获得的每一个 A 付钱时，他们就是在利用操作性条件反射来改变孩子的行为。严格来说，钱并不是奖励——但我们都知道它可以换成奖励。同样，在学校表现良好的金星、购物的积分和工作成就的徽章都可以用来推动我们的行为朝着期望的方向发展。

It also has obvious applications in the areas of education and consumer behaviour. It turns out that animals can learn to feel good not just about rewards, but about things that ‘stand for’ rewards – such as gold stars or points, for example. When a parent offers to pay their child for every A that they get in their exams, they are using operant conditioning to modify their child’s behaviour. The money isn’t strictly a reward – but we all know that it can be exchanged for rewards. Likewise, gold stars for good behaviour in school, points for purchases, and badges for accomplishments at work can all be used to push our behaviour in the desired direction.

在一个组织中，许多人完成课程（如 MBA 和较低级别的课程）主要是为了获得证书。证书可以钉在墙上，也可以添加到在线个人资料中，以换取尊重和自尊。这就是为什么颁发证书一直是组织学习计划的重要组成部分。

In an organization many people complete programmes – such as MBAs and lesser types – mainly to receive a certificate. The certificate can be pinned to a wall, or added to an online profile and traded for respect and self-esteem. This is why offering certificates has always been an important part of organizational learning programmes.

近年来，这种行为改变的方法有时被称为“游戏化”，令人困惑的是，它暗示了玩游戏的某些内容^——部分原因是许多现代游戏都采用了操作性条件反射，以让玩家花钱。

In recent years this approach to behaviour modification has sometimes been called ‘gamification’, which confusingly implies something about playing games⁸ – due in part to the fact that many modern games incorporate operant conditioning in order to get their players to spend money.

行为主义者表明，许多可以在动物身上表现出的行为条件反射机制也可以应用于人类：惩罚狗，狗会学习，惩罚人，人也会学习。

The behaviourists showed that many of the same behavioural conditioning mechanisms that could be demonstrated with animals could also be applied to humans: punish a dog and it learns, punish a human and they learn.

但许多行为主义者拒绝考虑内部心理状态（因为这些状态无法直接测量），这给他们的解释留下了巨大的漏洞。其中一个漏洞就是观察学习。

But the refusal of many behaviourists to consider internal mental states (since these couldn’t be directly measured) left gaping holes in their explanation. One of these holes was observational learning.

观察学习

Observational learning

如果你有孩子，你有时可能会担心他们从电视或如今更有可能的在线视频中学到了什么。

If you have children, you probably sometimes worry about what they are learning from watching television or, more likely these days, online video.

早在 20 世纪 60 年代，阿尔伯特·班杜拉就进行了一项如今著名的观察学习实验。本质上，他向幼儿（3 至 6 岁之间的男孩和女孩）展示了一段成年人踢打的视频一个大型充气玩具，发现它们很可能会模仿它们所看到的行为。不过，最有趣的是，他发现它们是否会模仿这种行为在一定程度上取决于它们所观察的人发生了什么^。9

Back in the 1960s, Albert Bandura conducted a now-famous experiment into observational learning. In essence, he showed young children (girls and boys, aged between three and six) a video of an adult kicking and punching a large inflatable toy, and found that they were likely to imitate what they had seen. Most interestingly, though, he found that whether or not they would imitate the behaviour depended, in part, on what happened to the person they were watching.⁹

我想这可能不会让人感到惊讶。如果你的朋友抚摸了一条狗，而狗咬了他，你会吸取教训，而不必遭受同样的命运。你可能不知道的是，即使是鸡也可以通过观看电影中其他鸡的行为来学习。诚然，鸡电影行业相当小众，但事实就是如此。

I guess this will probably not come as a surprise. If your friend strokes a dog, and the dog bites him, you will learn the lesson without having to suffer the same fate. What you may not know is that even chickens can learn from watching other chickens on film. Admittedly the chicken film industry is fairly niche, but there it is.

同样，虽然我们知道我们可以通过观察他人来学习，但这个过程是如何运作的这个问题仍未得到解答。情感情境模型表明，我们会自动模仿那些让我们产生情感联系的事物的情绪状态¹⁰ – 例如，如果我们去看一部电影，其中的英雄（我们认同的英雄）遭到残酷殴打，我们就会感到焦虑和压力。

Again, knowing that we are able to learn from observing others leaves unanswered the question as to how this process works. The affective context model suggests that we automatically mirror the emotional states of things that we feel emotionally connected to¹⁰ – so, for example, if we go and see a film in which the hero (with whom we identify) is brutally beaten, we experience anxiety and stress.

请注意，这种认同不仅仅基于外表。如果英雄恰好是一只狗（我们喜欢狗），那也很好。我们甚至会模仿更微妙的情感状态；当我们在街上与人擦肩而过时，我们会注意到他们的步态和表情，并自动想象成为他们的感觉。

Note that this identification is not based on appearance alone. If the hero happens to be a dog (and we like dogs), that also works just fine. We even mirror more subtle affective states; as we pass people in the street we pick up on their gait and expression and automatically imagine how it feels to be them.

这意味着，当我们通过让人们观看手术过程来培训人们进行手术时，演示手术过程错误的后果是非常重要的，否则人们就不太可能记住如何正确完成手术。

This means that when, for example, we are training people on a procedure by getting them to watch the procedure, it’s tremendously important to demonstrate the consequences of getting the procedure wrong, otherwise it is much less likely that a person will remember how to get it right.

举个简单的例子：你可以演示红灯前停车的正确方法，但如果你想让人们学会如何正确地停车，你实际上应该展示（或描述）不停车的后果。例如，这对于安全和数据保护培训具有重大意义。

A simple example: you can demonstrate the correct way to stop at a red light, but really you ought to show (or describe) the consequences of not stopping at a red light if you want people to learn to do it correctly. This has enormous implications for safety and data protection training, for example.

通过模仿讲故事所使用的过程（例如，讲述发生在犯下错误的员工身上的可怕事情的故事），我们可以产生更大的影响。

By mirroring the process that storytelling uses (for example, stories of awful things that happened to employees who screwed up), we can have far greater impact.

人类学习的这一特征的另一个结果是热情具有感染力。我们可能都记得那些对自己的学科充满热情的老师，而这种热情的一部分可以传递给我们，以及我们对同一主题的感受。如果没有情感情境模型，很难解释为什么热情对老师如此重要，尽管人们普遍认为热情和鼓舞人心的老师对他们的生活产生了很大的影响。

Another consequence of this characteristic of human learning is that the enthusiasm can be infectious. We probably all remember teachers who were really passionate about their subject, and some of this enthusiasm can transfer to us, and the way we feel about the same topic. Without the affective context model, it is hard to explain why enthusiasm should be so important in a teacher, though people do generally feel that enthusiastic and inspirational teachers have had a big impact on their lives.

但请注意，我们不会期望一位充满热情的数学老师一定会取得最好的考试成绩（因为考试成绩并不是衡量现实世界学习的好标准）。我的意思是，一位充满热情的数学老师可能会培养出对数学感觉良好并继续从事该领域的学生——但结果可能是，对考试感到恐惧的学生获得了最好的分数（并在以后的生活中像躲避瘟疫一样躲避数学）。

But note that we wouldn’t expect an enthusiastic maths teacher to necessarily produce the best test results (since test results aren’t a good measure of learning in the real world). What I mean is that an enthusiastic maths teacher may produce students who feel good about maths and go on to work in that field – but it may well turn out that students who feel terrified about exams get the best scores (and go on to avoid maths like the plague in later life).

如果你参加过会议，你就会知道，作为一名代表，你更愿意听那些对某个话题充满激情的人的演讲，而且这些演讲在你看来更令人难忘。当然也有例外：一个非常枯燥的演讲者可能会谈论与你的工作非常相关的事情。这种情况经常发生在我身上。

If you have ever been to a conference, you will know that, as a delegate, you would much rather attend lectures given by someone who speaks passionately about a topic and that these seem to you to be more memorable. There are, of course, exceptions to this: a very dull speaker might be talking about something that is terribly relevant to your line of work. This happens to me regularly.

既然人类和鸡的学习方式相似，你可能会想知道人类的学习方式是否有什么特别之处。我认为这是个好兆头——许多学习理论都假设人类的学习方式存在根本性的不同，而这很可能暴露出一种更深层次的偏见，例如倾向于建立基于理性的模型。

Having established that both humans and chickens can learn in a similar fashion, you may be left wondering if there is anything special about human learning at all. I would argue that this is a good sign – a lot of learning theories assume that there is something fundamentally different about human learning, and this is likely to betray a deeper bias, for example towards building models based around rationality.

预期学习

Anticipatory learning

虽然人类的学习在本质上并没有什么不同，但我们似乎在两个重要方面表现得更好：分享我们的感受和想象我们的感受。如果说有什么事情我们似乎比我们的进化亲戚做得更好，那就是描绘未来，以及——最重要的是——我们未来会有什么感受。

While there is nothing qualitatively different about human learning, we do seem to be better in two important areas: sharing our feelings and imagining how we would feel. If there is anything that we seem to be able to do better than our evolutionary relatives, it is picturing the future and – most importantly – how we will feel in future.

这意味着人类可以进行一种相对特殊的学习：预期学习。例如，你可以告诉某人，他们将在三个月后在舞台剧《罗密欧与朱丽叶》中扮演罗密欧的角色，他们就会惊慌失措，开始尽可能快地记住台词，只要想到要上台表演，就不会忘记要说什么。我很确定鸡不会这样做，尽管我还没有真正尝试过。

This means that there is a relatively special kind of learning that humans can do: anticipatory learning. You can, for example, tell someone that they will be playing the part of Romeo in a stage production of Romeo and Juliet in three months’ time and they will go into a panic and start learning lines as fast as they can, just at the thought of being onstage and not forgetting what to say. I’m pretty sure chickens don’t do this, though I haven’t actually tried it.

这种能力，即预测未来状态的能力，有趣的一点是，它在人类身上似乎成熟得相当晚，也许是因为它是与青少年观点采择发展有关的较复杂的认知功能之一^。11

One of the interesting things about this ability – the ability to project a future state – is that it seems to mature quite late in humans, perhaps because it is one of the more sophisticated cognitive functions relating to developments in adolescent perspective-taking.¹¹

这可能意味着尚未成年的学习者很难真正关心自己的未来。由于他们无法想象在 30 多岁时不得不砍掉鱼头的后果，他们很难立即产生努力学习的动力。同样，如果他们无法清楚地想象三个月后完全没有准备参加考试的感觉，他们可能会把复习留到最后一刻。

This may mean that learners who have not yet reached adulthood struggle to really care about their future selves. Since they can’t really imagine the consequences of having to spend their 30s chopping the heads off fish, they find it hard to develop the motivation to study hard right now. Equally, if they can’t clearly picture how it will feel to be totally unprepared for an exam in three months’ time, they may leave revision to the last minute.

这表明，如果你想用考试来吓唬人们，强迫他们记住东西，如果这些人还年轻，你应该每隔几周就给他们一次考试，而不是在学年末。我其实并不是提倡这样做；我只是指出，如果你想要欺负某人，可能有更有效和更不有效的方法。

This suggests that if you are going to frighten people with the prospect of exams as a way to force them to memorize stuff, if the people are young you should inflict exams every couple of weeks, rather than at the end of the academic year. I am not actually advocating this; I am just pointing out that if you are going to bully someone, there are probably more and less effective ways to do it.

然而，对于成年人来说，预期挑战可能会非常有效，尤其是如果如上文所述，挑战具有地位方面的意义——例如，必须向一群备受尊敬的人做陈述。此外，如果我们能够让预期结果对人们来说“真实”——例如使用模拟、虚拟现实，或者只是让那些能讲出引人入胜的故事的人——那么我们将有更好的机会转移关注点。

For adults, however, anticipated challenges can work quite well, especially if, as suggested above, there is a status-rich dimension to the challenge – for example having to present to a panel of highly respected individuals. In addition, if we are able to make anticipated outcomes ‘real’ for people – for example using simulations, VR, or just people who can tell a compelling story – then we will stand a better chance of shifting concern.

反复试验和游戏

Trial and error, and play

另外两种值得讨论的“推动”方法是“反复试验”和“玩耍”。玩耍可能是思考学习自然发生的最佳方式。这也是早期教育的一个很好的起点。许多动物都会玩耍；不难猜测玩耍和学习是密切相关的——问题是如何联系在一起的？

Two other ‘push’ approaches worth discussion are ‘trial and error’ and ‘play’. ‘Play’ is probably the best way to think about learning as it occurs naturally. It’s also a great starting point for early years education. Lots of animals play; it’s not difficult to guess that play and learning are closely related – the question is how?

从情感角度来看，玩耍就是为了结果。你可以想象在飞行模拟器上“玩耍”——这是学习驾驶飞机的好方法——但如果你认为飞行员只是在跨大西洋飞行时“玩耍”，你就会感到不安。

From an affective perspective, play is all about consequences. You can imagine ‘playing’ on a flight simulator – and this being a good way to learn about flying a plane – but you would be uneasy if you thought your pilot was just ‘playing around’ on your transatlantic flight.

同样，如果你有孩子（或者曾经是孩子），你会熟悉这样的借口：“但是我们只是在玩”，当后果比你预想的更严重时会用到这个借口，现在有 1）一个贵重物品碎成了碎片，2）一个小孩在哭，3）一个愤怒的成年人对你大喊大叫。

Equally, if you have children (or have ever been a child), you will be familiar with the excuse: ‘But we were only playing’, which is used when the consequences turn out to be more serious than you were expecting and now there is 1) a valuable object in pieces, 2) a small child in tears, and 3) an angry adult yelling at you.

成年后，我们往往很少玩耍，这有点遗憾，因为玩耍是一种很好的学习方式。我怀疑这种情况的发生有几个原因：成年后，我们变得更有能力想象和预期潜在的不良后果，而且社会不鼓励我们“玩弄”，而是严厉地看着我们，好像我们应该“知道自己在做什么”。表现出不知道自己在做什么通常被认为是一件坏事，所以为了避免尴尬，我们会停止这样做。

Play is something we tend to do a lot less of as adults, which is a bit of a shame, because it is a great way to learn. I suspect that this happens for a number of reasons: as adults we become more capable of imagining and anticipating potential bad outcomes, and also society discourages us from ‘playing around’ and instead looks sternly at us as if we should ‘know what we are doing’. Looking as if you don’t know what you are doing is often considered a bad thing, and so to avoid embarrassment we stop doing it.

玩耍是许多物种（例如老鼠）的自然行为，^随着动物成年，玩耍行为会逐渐减少。这表明玩耍并不是人类特有的社会结构，而是我们成长过程中自然的一部分。

Play occurs quite naturally in a wide range of species – such as rats, for example¹² – and tends to decline as animals enter adulthood. This suggests that it is not a social construct peculiar to humans, but a natural part of our development.

这也表明，玩耍在学习中起着核心作用，因为幼年动物（包括人类）会花大量时间玩耍，如果这种巨大的能量消耗没有任何用处，那真是太奇怪了。玩耍减少可能是由于在成年过渡期间发生的生物变化，并且假设生物体现在已经充分适应了其环境。

It also suggests that it plays a central role in learning, since young animals (including humans) spend large amounts of time engaging in play, and it would be very odd indeed if this huge expenditure of energy served no useful purpose. It may be that play declines due to biological changes that take place during the transition into adulthood, and on the assumption that the organism is now sufficiently adapted to its environment.

这就提出了一个有趣的问题：成年人在环境不断变化的情况下，继续玩游戏是否是一件好事。在美国，约有 43% 的 60 岁以上老人每天都玩电脑游戏，¹³这表明，人们进入成年期后，对游戏的兴趣并不会就此消失。

This raises the intriguing question as to whether continuing to play would be a good thing for adults to do, where their environment was subject to ongoing change. In the United States, around 43 per cent of people aged 60-plus play computer games every day,¹³ suggesting that the appetite for play is not simply extinguished as one enters adulthood.

玩耍是一种我们可以表达欲望而不会产生太严重后果的状态。一个简单的例子可能是“挠痒痒游戏”。一个人可能会挠另一个人。这可能是一种身体接触的渴望的表达——或者是为了影响他人——而另一个人可能会笑，直到他们用严肃的语气说：“停下来！现在够了！”，这表明游戏结束了，表明后果已经很严重了。

Play is a condition in which we can express our desires without the consequences being too serious. A simple example might be the ‘tickle game’. One person might tickle another person. This might be an expression of a desire for physical contact – or to influence others – and the other person might laugh, up to a point when they say: ‘Stop it! That’s enough now!’ in a serious voice, which signals the end of the game by indicating that the consequences are now serious.

小狮子如何知道它们的父母现在已经厌倦了玩耍？答案只能是情感后果的变化：以前它们只是嬉戏地打它们，现在却给它们造成巨大的痛苦。

How does a lion cub know that their parent is now tired of playing? The answer can only be a change in the affective consequences: where previously they were batting them about playfully, they are now inflicting significant pain.

在玩游戏时，人们会了解到表达情感冲动的后果以及世界“反击”的临界点。即使在游戏环境中，每个人对后果的反应也可能不同。有些人可能会发现，在飞行模拟器中成功起飞的成就感超过了坠机时的失望感。

In playing, a person learns about the consequences of expressing their affective impulses and the point at which the world ‘pushes back’. Individuals may vary in their reaction to the consequences – even within a play environment. Some people may find that the sense of accomplishment in successfully taking off in a flight simulator outweighs the sense of disappointment when they crash.

其他人对负面后果非常敏感——即使在游戏环境中也是如此——因此游戏需要根据个人的容忍度进行仔细调整。再一次，个人关注模式的个体差异通过游戏表现出来。

Other people are hyper-sensitive to negative consequences – even in the game environment – so play needs to be carefully calibrated to the individual’s tolerances. Once again, individual differences in a person’s pattern of concerns are surfaced through play.

如果我们为了学习目的而设置“游戏”情境，我们需要确保游戏环境中的后果与现实环境中的后果相似，另一方面后果不会太严重——因为如果后果太严重，游戏就不再是游戏了。例如，我们可以创建一个在线游戏，如果你做了一些鲁莽的事情，你就会在游戏中死亡，也许会失去一些虚拟财产或地位——但可能不会遭受沉重的经济惩罚^。14

If we are setting up a ‘play’ situation for learning purposes, we need to ensure on the one hand that the consequences within the play environment resemble those in the real environment, and on the other that the consequences are not too serious – because if they are, it will cease to be play. For example, we might create an online game where if you do something reckless you die in the game, and maybe lose some of your virtual possessions or status – but probably not suffer a heavy financial penalty.¹⁴

人们对角色扮演的反应可能大不相同；对于某些人来说，在同事面前犯错的风险可能与在现实生活中犯同样错误的风险一样大（甚至更大）。其他人可能不那么担心。

People may react very differently to role-play; for some of them the risk of making a mistake in front of colleagues may seem as great as (or greater than) the risk of making the same mistake in real life. Others may be less concerned.

将游戏作为一种学习方法与熟悉的培训环境中的传统方法进行比较是很有趣的：例如，你可以将传统的课堂培训与飞行员培训中的飞机模拟器进行比较。或者学习如何使用钻井平台。也许你最好从一个简单的游戏环境开始：例如单座飞机的驾驶舱，而不是 737 的复杂程度，然后让人们一个接一个地掌握。

It is interesting to compare play as a learning approach with the traditional approach in familiar training contexts: for example, you might compare conventional classroom training with an aircraft simulator in pilot training. Or learning how to use a drilling rig. Probably you would be well advised to start with a simplified play environment: the cockpit of a single-seater aircraft, for example, rather than the overwhelming complexity of a 737, and then allow people to master one after the other.

游戏比课堂培训的优势在于：在课堂上，我们很难赋予信息任何情感意义——因此它不会留在我们脑海中。在游戏中，情感意义自然而然地伴随着后果而来，因此我们学习得更有效率。

The advantage of play over classroom training is this: in a classroom we struggle to give the information any affective significance – so it doesn’t stick. In play, the affective significance comes naturally with the consequences, so we learn more efficiently.

其次，课堂培训往往侧重于存储信息，然后我们可以将其应用于我们的行为。但（如上所述）我们实际上并不存储信息——只是对信息的反应，我们可以用来重建它——所以这使得整个过程非常低效，而不是仅仅存储我们行为的情感结果。这就是为什么“边做边学”要好得多——因为感觉就在眼前^。15

Second, classroom training tends to focus on storing information which we can then apply to our behaviour. But (as explained above) we don’t actually store information – just a reaction to that information that we can use to reconstruct it – so this makes the whole process terribly inefficient, as opposed to just storing the affective outcome of our behaviours. This is why ‘learning by doing’ is much better – because the feelings aren’t two steps away.¹⁵

当然，有些情况下我们可能会担心人们只是通过“玩耍”来学习——例如手术。或者网络攻击。在这里，我们面临的挑战是双重的：创造一个游戏环境，让其后果足够类似于现实世界（所以玩手术游戏对八岁的孩子来说可能没问题，但对心脏外科医生来说就不行了）；其次，要“降低”这些环境的风险，让学习者感到放心尝试。我承认，有些棋盘游戏我不喜欢玩——例如大富翁——只是因为人们输了会很沮丧。显然我不会。

Of course, there are situations where we might be worried about people learning by just ‘playing around’ – surgery, for example. Or cyber-attack. Here our challenge is twofold: to create a play environment where the consequences sufficiently resemble the real world (so playing the game Operation might be fine for eight-year-olds but not for your heart surgeon) and, second, to ‘de-risk’ those environments so that learners feel comfortable trying things out. I confess, there are some board games I just don’t like to play – Monopoly for example – just because people tend to get quite upset when they lose. Not me, obviously.

反复试验其实是一种游戏的变体，但其中有一个真正的目标。比如说，你买了一台新的 DVD 播放器，但在设置时，你发现说明书不见了。你不必回到商店或在网上查找，而是开始按下遥控器上的按钮，看看会发生什么。请注意，一个非常年长的人可能不愿意这样做，因为他们害怕“炸毁电视”，但我们这一代人知道，科技带来的后果永远不会严重到无法通过关闭和重新打开来补救的程度。

Trial and error is really a variation on play, but where there is a real objective in mind. Let’s say, for example, that you buy a new DVD player, but on setting it up you discover that the instruction manual is missing. Rather than going back to the store, or looking it up online, you start pressing buttons on the remote control to see what happens. Note that a very old person might be reluctant to do this for fear of ‘blowing up the TV’, but we are from a generation that knows that with technology the consequences are never so severe that they can’t be remedied by turning it off and on again.

反馈

Feedback

现在可能正是谈论我想要介绍的最后一种“推动”方法的好时机：反馈。在这种情况下，“反馈”意味着让某人（或系统）向您描述您可能没有意识到的行为的一些后果。

This is probably a good point to talk about the last of the ‘push’ approaches that I wanted to cover: feedback. In this context, ‘feedback’ means having someone (or a system) describe to you some of the consequences of your behaviour that you might not be aware of.

想象一下：我们为飞行员训练设置了一个飞行模拟器。一名年轻的飞行员了解到他可以在一架 737 飞机上成功完成翻滚飞行。这是他第一次真正跨大西洋飞行，他在从伦敦飞往纽约的途中完成了一次翻滚飞行以示庆祝。机舱门上传来一阵敲门声。一名机组人员看起来一反常态地蓬头垢面，说道：“嗯——一点反馈：一些乘客对这种动作有点不安。”“谢谢，”他说，“这是有用的反馈。”

Picture the following: we set up a flight simulator for pilot training. One young pilot learns that he can successfully execute a barrel-roll in a 737. On his first real transatlantic flight he celebrates by performing a barrel-roll mid-way between London and New York. There is a tapping on the cabin door. One of the cabin crew, looking uncharacteristically unkempt, says: ‘Um – little bit of feedback: some of the passengers were a tad perturbed by that manoeuvre’. ‘Thanks,’ he says, ‘that’s useful feedback’.

很多时候，我们一生中对自己行为的后果只有部分认识——我们有自己的隐喻“舱门”。因为我们行为的情感后果会影响我们以后的行为，所以不了解这些后果可能会让我们的发展停滞不前。如果领导者没有意识到自己被视为麻木不仁和粗鲁无礼，他们可能无法晋升到更高级的职位，除非他们从未意识到这一点。

Oftentimes we go through life with only a partial awareness of the consequences of our actions – we have our own metaphorical ‘cabin doors’. Because the affective consequences of our behaviours shape our later behaviour, not being aware of these may bring our development to a halt. A leader who doesn’t realize that they are perceived as insensitive and abrasive may not progress to more senior positions if they are never made aware of this.

我们感知自己行为后果的能力都是有限的；因此，如果你希望在一生中不断发展和学习，那么拥有尽可能多的反馈来源至关重要，否则你只会达到自我意识的极限并停留在那里。

We all have limits on our ability to sense the consequences of our actions; for this reason, if you wish to continue to develop and learn throughout your lifetime, it is vital that you have as many sources of feedback as possible, otherwise you will simply rise to the limit of your self-awareness and stay there.

同样，对于年幼的孩子，成年人有时也难以以对他们有意义的方式给予反馈。两岁的鲍比用橡皮锤打了他的妹妹莎拉。她开始哭泣。他的妈妈把他拉到一边说：“如果莎拉用锤子打你，你会有什么感觉？”鲍比的表情呆滞，因为他根本无法想象，而实际的情感结果是父母在跟他说话。这就是为什么父母有时会说这样的话：“再这样我就把你的糖果拿走。”

It’s also true that with young children, adults sometimes struggle to give feedback in a way that is meaningful for them. Two-year-old Bobby whacks his sister Sarah with a rubber mallet. She starts crying. His mum takes him aside and says: ‘How would you feel if Sarah hit you with a hammer?’ and Bobby has a glazed expression because he literally can’t imagine that, and the actual affective outcome is a parent talking to him. This is why parents sometimes say things like: ‘Do that again and I will take away your sweets’ instead.

类似的事情也发生在大型组织中，管理团队担心在日益动荡的市场中生存，并说：“我们需要学会更具创新性”，但员工脸上呆滞的表情表明他们对此并没有强烈的感觉。老实说，如果你想在组织中做任何稍微改变一下的事情，那么起点就是绘制一张员工目前关心的事情的地图——要么这样做，要么就雇佣有不同关注点的人。

Something similar happens in big organizations where the management team are worried about surviving in an increasingly volatile market, and say: ‘We need to learn to be more innovative’, but the glazed expressions on the faces of employees suggest that they don’t feel very strongly about it. Honestly, if you wanted to do anything remotely transformative in your organization, the starting point would be a map of the things that your employees are currently concerned about – either that, or just hire people with different concerns.

在企业环境中（以及在亲子关系中），这种“情感错位”可能会带来问题。管理团队担心的事情与一线员工担心的事情截然不同。他们想知道为什么他们的“市政厅”演讲没有产生预期的影响，或者他们的变革计划失败了。

In corporate settings (as well as in parent–child relationships), this ‘affective misalignment’ can present problems. The things that the management team worry about are very different from the things their front-line employees worry about. They wonder why their ‘town hall’ addresses fail to have the desired impact or their change programmes fail.

我希望您现在能明白，很大一部分原因在于这种情感脱节；担心无法及时回家接孩子放学的人不会受到首席执行官关于每个人都需要创新的演讲的启发。为了建立这些联系，我们必须使用这里描述的相同技巧：花时间了解我们的受众关心的是什么，讲述有力的故事，打造有力的体验——或者只是确保有适当的激励措施。

As I hope you can now see, a big part of it relates to this affective disconnect; people who are worried about getting home in time to collect their children from school are not inspired by the CEO’s speech about the need for everyone to be innovative. In order to make these connections, we would have to use the same techniques described here: taking time to understand what it is that our audience care about, telling powerful stories, building powerful experiences – or just ensuring that the right incentives are in place.

关于反馈，人们接受和接受反馈的能力差异很大。例如，有些人一听到负面反馈就会立即产生防御心理。我们的敏感度会根据我们的关心程度而变化——一个人越关心某个特征，反馈就必须越敏感地处理。例如，如果某人重视人际敏感性并认为自己很敏感，他们可能会对暗示他们行为不敏感做出强烈反应。

On the subject of feedback, people vary tremendously in their ability to receive and accept it. Some will become immediately defensive at the hint of negative feedback, for example. Our sensitivities will tend to vary according to our cares – the more someone cares about a characteristic, the more sensitively the feedback must be handled. For example, if someone values interpersonal sensitivity and believes themselves to be sensitive, they may react strongly to the suggestion that they have behaved insensitively.

最后再说一下关于“推动”学习方法：这有时被解释为使学习更“引人入胜”的要求，然后有人批评说，并非所有引人入胜的东西都必然会导致深度学习；例如，一个人可能会去看一部关于登山灾难的电影，却记不住很多细节，尽管这部电影充满了戏剧性的紧张感。

A final word on ‘push’ approaches to learning: this is sometimes interpreted as a request to make learning more ‘engaging’, and the criticism is then raised that not everything that is engaging necessarily leads to deep learning; for example, one might go to see a film about a mountaineering disaster and not recall very much detail, despite the film being awash with dramatic tension.

对此，我作如下回应：首先，我们不应该将情感意义等同于参与度。参与度通常是指吸引注意力的内容。人们在传统营销中可能会遇到这种东西，即通过迎合我们的共同天性，对最多的人产生最大影响的营销。

By way of response to this: first, we should not equate affective significance with engagement. Engagement is a term that is typically used to mean attention-grabbing content. It is the kind of thing one might come across in traditional marketing, that is, marketing that is designed to have the greatest impact on the greatest number of people, simply by virtue of appealing to our shared nature.

但正如我所指出的，这实际上不是一种非常有效的方法，因为它没有直接解决我在特定情境中关心的事情。因此，在其他条件相同的情况下，从高处坠落的戏剧性场景很可能是登山电影中最令人难忘和最引人入胜的场景之一——但真正重要的是我是否要亲自去爬山。毕竟，我的情感背景决定了存储的内容。

But, as I have pointed out, this is not really a very effective approach, as it doesn’t directly address the things that I care about in this specific context. So, all things being equal, a dramatic fall from a great height is likely to be one of the more memorable and engaging scenes in a mountaineering movie – but what really matters is whether I am about to climb a mountain myself. It is my affective context that determines what is stored, after all.

只要我们忽视经历的个人意义而仅仅努力制作“引人入胜”的内容，我们就只能获得本来可以完成的学习的一小部分。

So long as we neglect the personal significance of experiences and simply strive to produce ‘engaging’ content, we will achieve only a tiny fraction of the learning that we might otherwise accomplish.

“拉动”式学习方法（消除）

‘Pull’ approaches to learning (elimination)

到目前为止，我一直在谈论“推动”方法——你可以将情感意义传递给人们，让他们关心某件事，进而推动他们的学习。但他们将从中学到什么呢？

So far, I have been talking about ‘push’ approaches – ways that you can transfer affective significance to people, so that they care about something, which in turn drives their learning. But what will they learn from?

资源

Resources

一旦有人关心某件事，他们就会非常乐意利用他们可用的资源。他们会从手头的支持来源“拉动”。很容易把“推动”和“拉动”的情况混淆起来。让我讲一个我曾经这样做过的故事。

Once someone cares about something, they will be quite happy to draw on resources that are available to them. They will ‘pull’ from the sources of support to hand. It’s quite easy to get ‘push’ and ‘pull’ situations mixed up. Let me tell a story about a time I did exactly that.

大约 20 年前，我在一家全球电信公司工作，该公司销售您办公桌上摆放的电话（如果您还有的话）（台式电话或座机）。这些电话功能强大，但使用起来却极其复杂。因此，我们的任务是为希望从复杂电话中获取价值的客户构建电子学习（基本上，我们是通过培训来修补设计不佳的系统）。

Around 20 years ago I was working for a global telecoms company that sells the kinds of phones that you have on your desk, if you still have one (either a desk or a desk phone). They were massively functional and blindingly complex to use. So we were tasked with building e-learning for customers wanting to get value from their complicated phones (basically we were patching a poorly designed system with training).

如前所述，我们开发了一个电子学习程序，其中有一个基于计算机的电话模拟，其中的人工智能角色会给你打电话并要求你执行一系列任务，这些任务的复杂性逐渐增加。这些角色具有人工智能元素，他们的表情和语气会根据他们的满意程度而改变，故事情节具有分支性和随机性——整个体验都融入了一个复杂的游戏化环境中。

As mentioned previously, we built an e-learning programme, featuring a computer-based simulation of the phone in which artificial characters would call you and ask you to perform a range of tasks, which gradually increased in complexity. The characters had an element of artificial intelligence, their expressions and tone changed in response to their degree of satisfaction, the storyline was branching and randomized – the whole experience built into a complex gamified environment.

我当时真是个傻瓜。当一个人学会如何设置电话会议时，他就会打电话给某个重要的人，对方会说：“你能把鲍勃加到这个电话会议里吗？”——这时候他们就不需要40 分钟的游戏化模拟。他们需要在电话旁边放一份一页的指南，上面写着“按 X、Y 和 Z 键设置电话会议”。我们建立了一个课程。我们应该建立一个资源。

I was an idiot. The point when someone learns how to set up a conference call is the point where they are on the phone to someone important who says: ‘Can you add Bob to this call?’ – and at that point they do not need a 40-minute gamified simulation. They need a one-page guide beside the phone that says ‘Press X, Y and Z to set up a conference call.’ We built a course. We should have built a resource.

请注意，如果我们创建了一个方便的资源，它很可能会留在手机旁边几个月。人们不太可能记住它；最多他们会对更常用的功能非常熟悉，以至于不再需要参考它们。

Note that if we had built a handy resource it would probably have remained, dog-eared, by the phone for months. It’s unlikely that people would memorize it; at best they would become so familiar with the more frequent functions that they no longer needed to refer to them.

因此，当你知道人们关心某件事时，最好建立资源。但什么是资源？

So when you know that people care about something, it is best to build a resource. But what is a resource?

资源有时被称为“绩效支持”，因为一般来说，任何能够有效帮助您完成手头任务的东西都是资源。您可能在不知不觉中自己创建了资源——例如，您是否曾经拍过一些重要的东西的照片，而您认为以后会忘记，以便您可以在手机上查看它？例如 WiFi 密码？恭喜您。您创建了一个资源——您认为：“我可能不会记得这个，所以我会拍一张照片，以便以后可以参考。”

Resources are sometimes called ‘performance support’ because in general they are anything that is effective in helping you to tackle the task at hand. You probably create resources yourself without realizing it – for example, have you ever taken a picture of something important that you think you will later forget, so that you can view it on your phone? WiFi codes, for example? Congratulations. You created a resource – you thought: ‘I probably won’t remember this, so I will take a picture that I can refer back to later’.

资源可以是一个人、一张地图、一份清单或任何数量的方便的东西——本章末尾的图 5.1中还有一些关于经验和资源的建议。

A resource can be a person, or a map, or a checklist, or any number of handy things – there are some more suggestions for experiences and resources in Figure 5.1 at the end of this chapter.

如今，人们经常使用谷歌作为资源——他们遇到问题，就用谷歌寻找答案。我最喜欢的资源示例是伦敦地铁地图。许多年前，我有一张折叠纸版的地图，我会随身携带。现在我把它当作一个应用程序。无论如何，毫无疑问，它每天帮助我从伦敦的一个地方到达伦敦的另一个地方。

These days, people often use Google as a resource – they hit a problem and they Google the answer. My favourite example of a resource is the map of the London Underground. Many years ago, I had a folding paper version that I would carry around. These days I have it as an app. Either way, there is absolutely no doubt that it helps me to get from one place in London to another place in London, on a daily basis.

请注意，这个定义确实很重要：有时你会发现自己正在查看某人称为“资源”的内容 - 但如果你真的想不出在什么情况下这是最好的资源，那么它可能根本就不是资源。它只是“内容”。

Note that there is something really important about this definition: sometimes you will find yourself looking at a piece of content that someone has called a ‘resource’ – but if you can’t actually think of a situation where this would be the best thing to have to hand, then it probably isn’t a resource at all. It’s just ‘content’.

在我谈论不同类型的资源之前，有必要解释一下它们的独特之处。

Before I talk about different types of resource, it’s worth explaining what makes them distinctive.

首先，如上所述，资源不是将学习内容分割成更小的部分后得到的。它不是“微学习”。我经常看到这种错误。之所以发生这种情况，是因为人们仍然有一种学习模式，即学习就是将内容灌输到人们的头脑中。这些人试图将“内容倾倒”到两小时的讲座中，但很少有内容能被记住。因此，他们将相同的内容分成更小的 20 分钟“电子学习模块”，人们讨厌这样做，而且效果也没有任何改善。现在他们将其分解成 5 分钟的视频并称之为“资源”，但底层方法仍然相同 - 仍然是内容转储。

First, as explained above, a resource is not what you get when you chop learning content into smaller pieces. It is not ‘micro-learning’. I see this mistake a great deal. It happens because people still have a model of learning in which learning is all about getting content into people’s heads. These are the people who tried ‘dumping content’ into two-hour lectures, and very little of it stuck. So they broke the same content into smaller 20-minute ‘e-learning modules’, and people hated that and it wasn’t any better. Now they are breaking it into 5-minute videos and calling them ‘resources’, but the underlying approach is still the same – it’s still content dumping.

资源是以任务为中心，而不是以主题为中心。当你查看资源时，你应该能够想到它能帮助你完成的任务。当我查看地铁地图时，我立即就能看出它能帮助我游览伦敦。另一方面，当我观看一段五分钟的视频，视频中有人对“领导风格”发表高谈阔论时，我不知道这会对我有什么帮助。也许，除了对领导风格发表高谈阔论。

A resource is task-centric, not topic-centric. When you look at a resource, you should be able to think of the task that it would help you to do. When I look at the Underground map, I can immediately see that it would help me get around London. On the other hand, when I look at a five-minute video where someone pontificates about ‘leadership styles’, I have no idea what that would help me to do. Except, perhaps, pontificate about leadership styles.

当然，这意味着你如何创建资源——你只有通过与人们交谈，了解他们关心的事情以及他们正在尝试做什么，才能真正创建有效的资源。另一方面，如果你所做的只是收集一些你认为可能对人们有帮助的东西，然后把它们塞进课程里——那么你可能就是在倾倒内容。

Of course, this implies something about how you create resources – you can only really create effective resources by talking to people and understanding the things that concern them, and what they are trying to do. If, on the other hand, all you have done is gather up some stuff that you think might help people and shove it in a course – then probably you are content dumping.

通过实践，这种区别会更容易被发现。如果有人要求你查看一些作为资源呈现的“学习内容”，请问自己：“这会帮助别人做什么？”如果没有真正有用的具体任务，那么这几乎肯定是内容倾销。

This distinction gets easier to spot with practice. If you are asked to look at some ‘learning content’ that is being presented as a resource, ask yourself: ‘What would this help someone to do?’ If there is no specific task for which it would be really useful, then it is almost certainly content dumping.

下一个值得关注的有趣事情是人们是否使用我们为他们创建的资源。你是否有过这样的经历：你需要一个问题的答案——比如如何烹饪某种食物——当你用 Google 搜索时，你可以在一页文字和一段视频之间做出选择——而你选择了一页文字？为什么会这样？难道人们不喜欢视频吗？

The next interesting thing to note is whether or not people use the resources that we create for them. Have you ever had that experience where you need the answer to a question – such as how to cook something – and when you Google it you have a choice between a page of text and a video – and you choose the page of text? Why is that? Don’t people prefer video?

根据经验法则，人们会选择在特定情况下最容易的选择，因此，除非你的资源是阻力最小的路线，否则人们会选择替代方案。这可能就是为什么你选择文本而不是视频的原因很多场合——视频是一种更丰富的格式，但就资源而言，简单才是王道。浏览一页说明比听视频（暂停和重播，跳过烦人的介绍）更快。

As a rule of thumb, people will use whatever is easiest in a given situation, and so unless your resource is the route of least resistance, people will choose the alternative. This is probably why you choose text over video on many occasions – video is a richer format, but when it comes to resources, simplicity is king. It is quicker to scan a page of instructions than to listen to a video (pausing and replaying, skipping the annoying intro).

这个问题有时会出现在组织为人们创建真正有用的资源，然后将其埋在某个可怕的 IT 系统中，无法找到的情况下。人们不会去寻找资源，而是直接向身边的人求助，然后“问朋友”。这样更简单。

This problem sometimes emerges where organizations create really useful resources for people, then bury them in some horrible IT system where they are impossible to find. Instead of tracking down the resources, people simply turn to the person next to them and ‘ask a friend’. It’s just easier.

在设计环境以优化性能时，这种考虑变得非常重要——不仅需要设计正确的资源，还需要在人们需要时准确地访问它们。一个很好的例子是衣服上的洗涤说明。衣服没有附带说明书，说明书不可避免地会被放在厨房抽屉的底部——相反，当你准备把它们扔进洗衣机时，你拿起它们，说明书就在那里。

This consideration becomes really important when engineering environments to optimize performance – not only do the right resources need to be designed, they need to be accessible at precisely the points when people need them. A neat example of this is the washing instructions in clothes. Clothes don’t come with an instruction manual, which inevitably makes its way to the bottom of a kitchen drawer – instead you pick them up as you are about to throw them into the washing machine, and the instructions are right there.

最后，让我们重新审视一个深刻的哲学观点：好的资源往往会消除学习。事实上，资源越好，学习的需要就越少。作为人类，我们是认知吝啬鬼。这意味着，如果避免在头脑中存储信息更容易，我们就会这么做。如今，我们似乎越来越多地参考资料——用谷歌搜索来度过一生，而不是记忆信息。为什么不呢？学习需要认知成本，所以只要有可能，查找东西是有意义的。

Finally, let’s revisit a deep, philosophical point: good resources often eliminate learning. In fact the better a resource is, the more it reduces the need to learn. As humans, we are cognitive misers. This means that if it is easier to avoid storing information in our heads, we will. These days, we seem to be referencing more and more – Googling our way through life rather than memorizing information. And why not? Learning is cognitively costly, so it makes sense to look things up whenever possible.

你们中有些人可能已经注意到，我的地铁地图（严格来说）并不是一个学习工具。事实上，恰恰相反。多年来，我每天都使用同一张地图，这表明它积极地抑制了我的学习。我的意思是，如果我被迫在没有地图的情况下在伦敦寻找路线，我很确定我会在几周内掌握大部分布局。但有了地图，我几乎不知道一条路线。

Some of you may have noticed that my Underground map is not (strictly speaking) a learning tool. In fact, quite the opposite. I have been using the same map daily for many years, which suggests that it has actively suppressed my learning. What I mean is that if I were forced to find my way around London without a map, I am pretty sure I would have picked up much of the layout in a matter of weeks. But with the map, I barely know a single route.

再举一个例子：购物清单。想象一下派两组人去超市：一组人必须记住 50 件物品，另一组人则将这些物品列在清单上。你认为谁会在一天后记住更多物品？清单的作用是消除学习的需要。没有什么可以阻止一个人记住清单上的物品，如果他们愿意这样做的话——但他们在什么条件下会这样做呢？也许如果字迹难以辨认，或者清单写在一个巨大的笨重的纸板箱上。你明白我的意思：资源作为资源的效果越好，我们学习的可能性就越小。

Here’s another example: a shopping list. Imagining sending two groups of people to the supermarket: one group has to memorize 50 items, the other has them on a list. Who do you imagine will remember more of the items a day later? The list works to remove the need to learn. There is nothing stopping a person memorizing the items on the list, should they wish to do so – but under what conditions would they do that? Perhaps if the writing were illegible, or the list written on a giant cumbersome cardboard box. You get my point: the better a resource works as a resource, the less likely we will learn.

这也是我们不能将资源等同于“微学习”的另一个原因。资源常常会消除学习的需要——所以我们不能真正我们可以称其为微学习。但我想你们中的一些人对此并不完全满意。确实如此。有时我们会在 Google 或 YouTube 上搜索某些内容，我们确实会学习；我们确实会将信息存储在我们的头脑中。

This is another reason why we cannot equate resources with ‘micro-learning’. Oftentimes resources eliminate the need to learn – so we can’t really call them micro-learning. But I imagine some of you are not entirely happy with this. Quite right. There are times when we Google something – or YouTube it – and we do learn; we do store the information in our heads.

例如，我可能会查找如何做煎饼，观看一段简短的视频，然后下次不用查找就知道该怎么做了。那么，什么时候学习是从资源中发生的，什么时候不是呢？

For example, I might look up how to cook pancakes, watch a short video, then know how to do it next time without looking it up. So when does learning happen from a resource and when not?

想想看：我要花多长时间才能记住一张地铁地图？又要花多长时间才能记住如何做煎饼？

Consider this: how long would it take me to memorize a map of the Underground? And how long to remember how to cook pancakes?

要了解一种资源是有助于学习还是抑制学习，关键在于特定环境下的相对成本：我很容易参考地铁地图（因为它在我的手机上），但要记住它却需要几个月的时间。另一方面，如果我做煎饼不止几次，那么记住几个步骤对我来说要比一遍又一遍地听那个烦人的电视厨师的节目、同时努力不让手机屏幕上的面糊变得模糊要容易得多。

The key to understanding whether or not a resource aids or suppresses learning is the relative costs in a specific context: it’s easy for me to reference the Underground map (since it is on my phone) and would take months to memorize. On the other hand, if I am cooking pancakes more than a couple of times, it’s easier for me to remember a couple of steps than it is to listen to that annoying TV chef all over again while trying not to get batter on my phone screen.

这一点值得考虑，因为没有绝对的答案——它会因人而异，因环境而异。使用 iPad 应用程序识别星座可能更容易，但如果你的目的是在炎热的夏夜给约会对象留下深刻印象，你可能会把它们牢牢地记在心里。只要有足够的情感回报，我们就会付出努力。

This point is worth considering, because there is no absolute answer – it will vary from individual to individual and from context to context. It might be easier to use an iPad app to identify stellar constellations, but if your objective is to impress a date on a hot summer’s night, you might commit them to memory. We will invest the effort, given sufficient affective returns.

我怀疑，资源的最后一个方面让一些教育工作者感到很不安；教育工作者习惯于从学习目标和人们“必须记住”的信息的角度来思考。我们的新模式将控制点转移到学习者身上：我们的工作是创造有效的资源，但他们是否选择从中学习或只是使用它们完全取决于个人。

This final aspect of resources makes some educators quite uneasy, I suspect; educators are used to thinking in terms of learning objectives and the information that people ‘must remember’. Our new model shifts the locus of control to the learner: our job is to create effective resources, but whether or not they choose to learn from them or just use them is entirely up to the individual.

这对于学习测量的意义也十分重要：测量一个人能够记住哪些知识已经变得不再重要；相反，我们关注的是一个人能够做什么，并把学什么和不学什么的决定权留给他们自己。

The implication for learning measurement is also important: it becomes irrelevant to measure what knowledge someone has been able to memorize; instead we focus on what someone is able to do and leave the decisions around what to learn and what not to learn to them.

从培训的角度来看，评估条件与操作条件相似非常重要；例如，如果我在操作环境中不太可能使用笔记本电脑，那么在评估期间我也不应该使用它。

From a training perspective, it is important that the assessment conditions resemble the operating conditions; for example, if I am unlikely to have access to a laptop computer in the operating environment, I should not have access to it during the assessment.

我将在下一章中再次讨论这个主题——学习消除，因为从学习的未来角度来看，它尤其重要。但现在让我们考虑一些可能的资源类型。

I will return to this topic – learning elimination – in the next chapter, since it is especially important from the perspective of the future of learning. But for now let’s consider some possible resource types.

视频

Video

当教育界人士接触到视频时，坏事就会发生。同样，这些事情之所以会发生，是因为人们仍然抱有这种将学习视为知识转移的腐败观念，他们认为新技术和媒体可以做他们以前做过的同样可怕的事情——只是效率更高。

When education people get their hands on video, bad things happen. Once again, these things tend to happen because people still have this corrupt notion of learning as knowledge transfer, and they see new technologies and media as a way of doing precisely the same awful things they did before – only more efficiently.

比如，想象一下，你所在的大学有很多教职员工忙着讲课，而学生虽然付费上课，但经常不上课。你面临着降低成本和实现现代化的压力，但你并不知道这意味着什么，只知道应该在网上做一些事情。

Imagine, for example, that you were a university with lots of teaching staff busily giving lectures, and students who pay to attend the university but frequently don’t attend the lectures. You are under pressure to reduce costs and modernize, but you don’t really know what that means except that it should involve doing something online.

有一件非常糟糕的事情你可以做，那就是把这些讲座拍下来，连同一些文档和聊天框一起放到网上，称之为 MOOC（大规模开放在线课程），然后向远方的人收取少量费用来观看。这怎么会是一个坏主意呢？

One really awful thing that you could do would be to film those lectures, put them online together with some documents and a chat box and call it a MOOC (massive open online course), and charge people in far-off places a small amount to watch them. Why would this be a bad idea?

首先，这是一个坏主意，因为学生来这里是为了证书，而不是为了听课。由于他们通常通过考试而不是上课来获得证书，所以他们会想出最有效的方法来获得证书——那就是不去听课。如果你去听课，通常不是为了学习，而是为了做笔记。人们做笔记是为了不必记住讲过的内容，而是可以参考笔记。然后，学生们利用笔记在他们认为可行的距离实际考试尽可能短的时间内复习考试，有时是在考试前一天晚上。

First, it’s a bad idea because students are there for the certificates, not the lectures. Since generally they get the certificates for passing the exams and not for turning up to the lectures, they will figure out the most efficient way to achieve that result – which is not attending the lectures. If you attend the lectures it is typically not to learn, it is to take notes. A person takes notes so that they don’t have to remember what was said, but instead can refer back to the notes. Students then use the notes to revise for the exam at the shortest possible distance from the actual exam that they deem feasible, which is sometimes the night before.

当然，知道了这是怎么回事，聪明的学生就不会去听讲座，而是利用教科书，或者借用那些因为对自己未来的就业前景非常焦虑、害怕父母而去听讲座的学生的笔记。

Of course, knowing that this is how it works, the smart student won’t go to the lectures but either make use of the textbooks or just borrow the notes of a student who is so terribly anxious about their future job prospects and afraid of their parents that they actually go to lectures.

“人们上课不是为了学习”这样的说法可能有点牵强。理论上讲，如果讲座主要以对话、故事和实践活动为主，那么你可以从讲座中学习。但事实并非如此；部分原因是大学为了省钱而提高学生/教师比例，但主要原因是教师认为，他们上课的职责就是将信息灌输到人们的头脑中，而他们有大量的信息需要传达。讽刺的是，他们实际上没有时间学习。

It might sound a bit sweeping to say: ‘People don’t attend lectures to learn’. Theoretically you could learn from a lecture – if it was largely based around conversations, stories and practical activities. But of course they are not; in part because universities bump up the student/teacher ratios in the interests of saving money, but largely because teachers believe that getting information into people’s heads is what they are there to do and they have a huge amount of information to get through. Ironically, they literally don’t have time for learning.

当你把讲座视频放到网上时，人们有时会去看看——通常只是因为一个机构的声誉——然后很快弄清楚 1) 你没有获得证书，2) 讲座实际上并没有帮助他们做任何他们想做的事情（因此不是有用的资源）。

When you put videos of lectures online, people will sometimes go and take a look – often just because of an institution’s reputation – and quickly figure out that 1) you don’t get a certificate, and 2) the lectures don’t actually help them to do any of the things they are trying to do (so aren’t useful resources).

备受尊敬的常春藤盟校向全世界分享其教学材料，但人们发现，几乎没有人会仔细阅读这些材料，原因很简单，教育的真正目的不是学习，而是颁发证书（证书可以让你获得工作机会），如果没有证书，那么还有更好的学习方式。你可能会想，如果这些课程真的是为了学习，那么现在这个世界上应该到处都是受过高等教育的人，但事实并非如此。

So respected Ivy League institutions share their teaching materials with the world, only to find that hardly anyone does more than glance at them, for the simple reason that education is not really about learning but about granting certificates (which grant access to jobs), and if there are no certificates on offer, there are better ways to learn. You would have thought that if these courses really were about learning, the world would be awash with highly educated people by now, but it is not.

即使有证书，人们也会很快找到更有效的方法来获得证书（就像学生们几十年来所做的那样）——通过伪造、分包或只是最后一刻的复习。这一切听起来很疯狂，但实际上很好，因为如果你真的找到了一份工作，它很可能与你的学习领域没有多大关系，无论如何，你都会在工作中学习如何做。

Even if there were certificates on offer, people would quickly figure out (as students have been doing for decades) more efficient ways of obtaining them – through forgery, subcontracting or just good old last-minute revision. This all sounds crazy, but is actually fine, since if you actually ever get a job it is likely to bear scant relation to your area of study and in any case you will learn how to do it on the job.

结果是：不要使用视频进行内容倾销。

The upshot is: don’t use video for content dumping.

那么视频的良好用途是什么呢？视频在两种特定情况下效果良好，一个是“推”，一个是“拉”。

So what are good uses of video? Video works well in two specific contexts, one ‘push’, one ‘pull’.

在“推送”语境中，视频可以很好地讲述故事或传达情感。我们知道这一点；我们去看电影。但好故事富含情感，所以如果你的演讲者平淡无奇，就不要让他们站在镜头前，看在上帝的份上，让人们讲故事（而不是试图告诉人们他们所知道的东西）。

In the ‘push’ context, video can be good for telling a story or communicating an emotion. We know this; we go to the movies. But a good story is rich in emotion, so if your speaker is as dull as ditchwater, don’t put them in front of a camera, and for heaven’s sake get people to tell stories (rather than trying to tell people what they know).

另外，永远不要在视频中写剧本。多年来，我一直在拍摄人们试图传达某种信息，我发现使用提词器有两个非常有害的影响：首先，除非你是专业人士，否则所有观看视频的人都会立即意识到你在读剧本，因此使用视频就失去了任何价值（因为你还不如把剧本发给他们）；其次，如果你记不住你想表达的观点，别人记住的可能性有多大？

Also – never script video. Having spent many years filming people trying to communicate something, I have noticed that use of an autocue has two highly damaging effects: first, unless you are a professional it is immediately obvious to everyone watching that you are reading a script – and so any value in using video is lost (since you might as well have sent them the script); second, if you can’t remember the points you want to make, what are the chances that someone watching will?

在“拉动”的背景下，视频对于向人们展示如何做难以用语言描述的事情非常有用。例如，如果我试图学习跳舞，看别人跳舞比将描述翻译成文字要容易得多。一个很好的例子是游戏演练，人们在视频游戏中卡在某个点时会观看别人如何掌握挑战。

In the ‘pull’ context, video is useful for showing people how to do something that would be tough to describe in words. If I am trying to learn to dance, for example, it’s much easier to watch someone do it than it is to translate a description into words. A good example of this is game walkthroughs, where people stuck at a point in their video game will watch to see how someone else has mastered the challenge.

不过，大多数情况下，当我们寻找资源时，例如使用谷歌搜索时，我们会避开视频，而是点击文本格式的链接。这是因为我们直观地知道视频通常用于内容转储：主持人喋喋不休的费力的扩展介绍。

Mostly, though, when we are looking for a resource, for example when Googling, we avoid video and click instead on links to text formats. This is because we intuitively know that videos are often used for content dumping: the laborious extended introduction where the presenter blathers on and on.

有了文档，我们可以快速浏览并找到所需的信息，所以我们选择这些。资源格式有很多种：信息图表、指南、提示、流程图等等。重要的不是格式本身，而是它直接解决人们担忧的程度。

With a document, we can quickly scan and find the bit we need – so we choose these. There are a number of resource formats: infographics, guides, tips, flow-charts and so on. The important thing is not the format itself, but the extent to which it directly addresses a person’s concerns.

例如，“十大错误”在任何领域通常都是很受欢迎的资源，因为大多数人都隐性地担心自己看起来不愚蠢。尽管如此，在教育节目中很少看到“十大错误”，因为教育通常以内容为中心，而不是以情境为中心。

For example, ‘top 10 mistakes’ is usually a popular resource in any field, since most people are implicitly concerned about not looking stupid. Despite this, it is very rare to see ‘top 10 mistakes’ feature in an educational programme, for the reason that education is typically content-centric rather than context-centric.

创建资源的提示

Tips for creating resources

在创建资源时，重要的是要尽可能保持简单，并抵制陷入“人们需要知道什么”模式的诱惑。以下是一些简单文本格式的一般建议：

When creating resources it is important to keep things as simple as possible and resist the temptation to slip into ‘what people need to know’ mode. Here are a couple of bits of general advice in simple text format:

• 使其实用：谈论背景，而不是内容。毫无疑问，如果您想要设计有用的资源，您需要了解人们的关注点和任务。按任务而不是主题组织您的资源：如果我要尝试安装架子，我只需要“如何安装架子”，而不是以“第一章：家庭维护的历史”开头的内容。

• Make it practical: talk to the context, not the content. It goes without saying that you need to understand the concerns and tasks people have if you are going to stand any chance at all of designing useful resources. Organize your resources by task, not topic: if I am trying to put up shelves, I just need ‘How to put up shelves’, not something that begins with ‘Chapter One: The history of home maintenance’.

• 保持简短：如果您的资源不是绝对最容易找到和使用的东西，人们就会使用其他东西。实际上，这通常意味着内容不超过一页。如果内容超过一页，请将其拆分。

• Keep it short: if your resource is not absolutely the easiest thing to find and use, people will use something else. In practice, this generally means nothing is more than one page. If it’s longer than that, break it down.

• 直观：使用图表和图形比使用文字更容易理解，但不要仅仅为了理解而使用图表和图形。

• Be visual: use diagrams and graphics where these will be easier to understand than words, but not just for the sake of it.

• 为使用而设计：好的设计不是让事物看起来优雅，而是让它们与使用环境紧密结合。例如，您可能会为驾驶地铁列车的人设计一个导航屏幕——然后意识到，在隧道中驾驶时，白色屏幕上的黑色文字非常令人分心。

• Design for use: good design isn’t about making things look elegant, but about making them fit snugly into the context where they will be used. For example, you might design a screen of guidance for people driving subway trains – and then realize that black text on a white screen is very distracting when driving through tunnels.

• 像朋友一样说话：我们在学校里发生了一些可怕的事情，结果是每当人们被要求写一些与学习有关的东西时，他们就会陷入“老师”的语气并试图听起来有点学术性。

• Talk like a friend: something horrible happens to us at school, with the result that whenever people are asked to write something to do with learning, they slip into a ‘teacherly’ tone and attempt to sound vaguely academic.

• 如果可以的话，请进行策划：人们通常会创建已经存在的、更好的资源。在创建资源之前，先看看已经有什么。

• Curate if you can: people will often create resources that already exist, and are better. Have a look at what is out there already before creating a resource.

• 让资源易于获取：如果在需要时找不到，好的资源就无法使用。教育仍然受到其专制过去的困扰，期望人们从我们的系统中学习内容——这当然就是为什么学生如果能在网上获取信息就会逃课的原因。了解你的受众喜欢什么，并使用他们的方法。

• Make it accessible: good resources will fail if you can’t find them when you need them. Education still suffers from its authoritarian past, expecting people to learn our content from our systems – which of course is why students will skip lectures if they can get the information on the internet. Find out what your audience prefer, and use their approaches.

总而言之，有效资源有三个关键因素：

In summary, there are three key ingredients for effective resources:

1. 实用性：它们必须真正有用（而不仅仅是因为您认为它们看起来有用而随意拼凑起来的一些东西）。

2. Utility: they have to be genuinely useful (and not just some stuff that you threw together because you thought it looked useful).

3. 可访问性：它们必须是最容易访问和使用的，无论何时何地人们需要访问它们（否则他们会使用其他东西）。

4. Accessibility: they have to be the easiest thing to access and use when and where people need to access them (or they will use something else).

5. 意识：人们需要知道资源在哪里（因此您可能需要做一些营销或提高意识的活动）。

6. Awareness: people need to know where the resources are (so you may need to do some marketing or awareness-raising).

我希望本章中的例子能让您很好地理解我在描述推拉频谱中的两类学习活动时的意思：体验增加了我们的关注点，而资源则对关注点做出回应。上面的列表只是触及了表面。图 5.1可能会让您更好地了解在设计体验或性能支持时可能考虑的一些其他事项（以及您可能希望开发的一些功能）——但我相信您可能还能想到更多。

I hope that the examples in this chapter give you a good sense of what I mean when I describe the two classes of learning activity along the push–pull spectrum: experiences add to our concerns, while resources respond to them. The list above is just scratching the surface. Figure 5.1 might give you a better sense of some of the other things that you might consider when designing experiences or performance support (as well as some capabilities you might wish to develop) – but I am sure you can probably think of many more.

我上面列出的一些内容有时可能位于图表的一侧或两侧。例如，我将“指导”和“辅导”都列为经验，因为它们通常是预定的课程。但可以想象教练或导师随时待命的情况——在这种情况下，他们的角色更类似于资源。他们可能在不同时间扮演不同的角色。正如我们上面所看到的，视频可能是简单的“操作方法”，也可能是更详细的叙述。

Some of the things I have listed above may sit on either – or both – sides of the diagram at times. For example, both ‘mentoring’ and ‘coaching’ I have listed as experiences, since they are generally scheduled sessions. But one can imagine situations in which coaches or mentors are available on demand – in which case their role is more akin to that of a resource. It is possible that they may play different roles at different times. As we have seen above, a video might be a simple ‘how to’ or a more extended narrative.

为了支持这两种创造性活动——资源创造和体验创造——学习专业人士需要一套与以人为本的设计相关的核心技术。其中许多技术已经存在，并已在其他设计领域得到应用，例如产品开发。学习专业人士必须扩展这套工具，特别是在体验设计领域，这在很大程度上仍是尚未开发的领域。

In order to support these two types of creative activity – the creation of resources and the creation of experiences – learning professionals will need a core set of techniques related to human-centred design. Many of these techniques already exist and are in use in other areas of design, such as product development. Learning professionals will have to extend this toolset, especially in the area of experience design, which is still largely unexplored territory.

除了这些技术之外，学习专业人员还需要广泛的创造能力，以便创造出最有用或最有影响力的资源或经验。

Allied with these techniques, learning professionals will need a wide range of creative capabilities in order to create the kinds of resources or experiences that will be most useful or impactful respectively.

随着组织预测未来，在我们逐步迈向自动化的过程中，资源和指导似乎将在提高员工绩效和竞争优势方面发挥越来越大的作用。

As organizations anticipate the future, it seems that resources and guidance are set to play an ever-greater role in delivering employee performance improvements and competitive advantage as we inch our way towards automation.

下一章将更详细地讨论从课程到资源的转变。

The next chapter considers the shift from courses to resources in more detail.

请看图 6.1。这是我称之为学习消除曲线的直观说明。

Have a look at Figure 6.1. It’s a visual illustration of something that I have come to call the learning elimination curve.

前提很简单：你距离人们需要信息的点（“需求点”）越远，你在让人们记住信息上所浪费的时间和金钱就越多。

The premise is simple: the further away from the point at which people need information (‘point of need’) you are, the more time and money you are going to waste trying to get people to memorize the information.

例如，如果你在六个月前花两天时间在课堂上学习绩效管理，那么你可能只会记得三件事。如果你能在某人需要之前立即将这三件事交给他们，那么你将以极少的时间和成本获得相同的结果。换句话说，这条曲线代表从课程（右上）到资源（左下）的转变。

If, for example, you spend two days in a classroom learning about performance management six months before you are due to apply it, you might only recall three things. If you could deliver those three things to someone immediately before they need them, you would achieve the same outcome at a fraction of the time and cost. In other words, this curve represents the shift from courses (top right) to resources (bottom left).

您可能在个人生活中经历过这种效果，例如，您可以使用 Google 或 YouTube 来查找东西，而不是记住它们。

You may have experienced this effect in your personal life where, for example, you use Google or YouTube to look things up as an alternative to having to memorize them.

如果你想知道这条曲线从何而来，那就是颠倒的艾宾浩斯曲线；虽然我们已经确定艾宾浩斯有点白痴，但他的研究确实适用于精神漂浮物——这正是人们倾向于在教育项目中推广的那种信息。

If you are wondering where the curve comes from, it is Ebbinghaus upside-down; and while we have established that Ebbinghaus was a bit of an idiot, his research does hold true for mental flotsam – which is precisely the kind of information that people tend to push in educational programmes.

外科医生阿图尔·葛文德 (Atul Gawande) 博士也为这一现象提供了进一步的证据，他是一本名为《清单宣言》的优秀书籍的作者^。1阿图尔对如何在自己的专业领域改善生死攸关的情况的结果很感兴趣。他研究了其他行业如何成功处理高风险程序，在波音公司工作了一段时间，并开始意识到一种特定资源——清单——所发挥的关键作用。

Further support for this phenomenon comes from a surgeon called Dr Atul Gawande, author of an excellent book called The Checklist Manifesto.¹ Atul was interested in how one might improve outcomes in life-and-death situations in his own professional field. He looked at how high-risk procedures are successfully handled in other industries, spending time with Boeing, and began to appreciate the critical role played by one particular kind of resource – the checklist.

随后，他设计并实施了一份供外科手术团队使用的检查表，成功将死亡率降低了一半，并发症减少了 36%——这是一个非凡的结果，比通过长时间的培训课程取得的成果要成功得多。从本质上讲，他证明了在改变行为方面，按需绩效支持比传统培训更有效。通过外化信息，检查表消除了学习的需要。

He subsequently designed and implemented a checklist to be used by surgical teams, and was able to cut deaths by half and reduce complications by 36 per cent – an extraordinary outcome, and considerably more successful that that achieved by lengthy training sessions. In essence, he had demonstrated that point-of-need performance support can be much more effective than conventional training at changing behaviour. The checklist had removed the need to learn, by externalizing the information.

有趣的是，一些试图重现 Atul 令人印象深刻的结果的人却无法做到这一点——清单似乎没有带来太大的变化。当他们探究原因时，最有可能的解释似乎是他们只是不够关心而没有使用它们。请注意，这正是情感情境模型所预测的：资源对于关心某事的人来说是一种有效的方法，但对于不关心的人来说，它们只会带来更多的噪音。

Interestingly, some of the people who attempted to reproduce Atul’s impressive results were unable to do so – the checklists didn’t seem to make much of a difference. When they explored why, the most likely explanation seemed to be that they just didn’t care enough to use them. Note that this is precisely what the affective context model would predict: resources are an effective approach for people who care about something, but for people who don’t they will just be more noise.

资源在某些情况下能发挥非常好的作用，但在其他情况下却完全不起作用，这提醒我们，了解受众的顾虑是多么重要：如果不知道是什么驱动了他们的行为，你就无法自信地预测哪种方法（资源或经验）会实现预期的结果。

That resources work extraordinarily well in some circumstances but not at all in others is a reminder of how important it is to understand the concerns of your audience: without knowing what is driving their behaviour, you can’t confidently predict which approach – resources or experiences – will achieve the desired outcome.

但也许现在是时候回到一个可能一直困扰你的问题了：当我们生产资源时，这些真的是“学习资源”吗？换句话说，我们只是把大块的把人们在课堂上遇到的学习内容分成更小的部分，从而实现“微学习”？答案是：可能不会。

But perhaps this is the right point to return to a question that may have continued to trouble you: when we produce resources, are these really ‘learning resources’? Are we, in other words, just breaking the big chunks of learning that people encounter in courses into smaller pieces so as to deliver ‘micro-learning’? The answer is: probably not.

正如我们之前所看到的，资源通常是可以减少你学习需要的东西，所以它不能真正被称为“学习”或“微学习”——或任何其他类型的学习。回想一下我的伦敦地铁地图示例。我每天都使用这个资源来帮助我从伦敦的一个地方到另一个地方——但我从来没有试图记住它。

As we saw previously, a resource is usually something that reduces your need to learn, so it cannot really be called ‘learning’ or ‘micro-learning’ – or any other kind of learning. Think back to my map of the London Underground example. I use this resource on a daily basis to help me get from one place to another around London – but at no point do I attempt to memorize it.

事实上（相当遗憾）我已经使用同一张地图好几年了，但仍然需要查阅熟悉的路线，这表明情况正好相反：它实际上是学习的替代品。如果有人夺走了我的地图，我想我会学得更快。

In fact (rather sadly) I have been using the same map for several years, but still have to consult it for familiar routes, which suggests the opposite: it is actually a substitute for learning. If someone had deprived me of my map, I suspect I would have learned a lot faster.

您在汽车上使用 GPS 时可能遇到过同样的情况；您经常用它行驶特定的路线，但有一天它不工作了，您发现自己无法找到这条路线。

You may have experienced the same when using GPS in your car; you use it to drive a particular route frequently, but one day it doesn’t work and you realize that you can’t find the route on your own.

这对课堂笔记来说是个不祥之兆。你认为学生为什么要在课堂上做笔记？是为了更好地记住内容吗？不！是为了不用记住内容！这样他们就可以减少在课堂上学习的内容，而是利用这段时间构建有用的资源，用于备考。这真是一幅可怜的画面，不是吗？讲师们照本宣科，这样他们就不用记住讲座内容了；学生们写笔记，这样他们也不必记住讲座内容，以便创建一种在需要时可以使用的资源。

This is ominous news for note-taking in class. Why do you think students are taking notes in class? So that they can better remember the material? No! So that they don’t have to remember the material! So they can reduce the learning that they do in class, and instead use the time to construct a useful resource that they can use to cram for the exam. That’s a pitiful picture, isn’t it? Lecturers reading from notes so that they don’t have to remember the lecture, to students writing notes so that they don’t have to remember it either, in order to create a resource they can use when the need arises.

你可能在会议上看到过这种做法的现代版本：人们看到屏幕上投影出有用的东西，就会用手机拍下快照。他们这样做是为了创造一种资源——这样他们就不必记住它了。我有时在公共场所用 WiFi 代码做这件事，因为我假设从打印代码的地方走到我现在坐的地方，十步之内我就会忘记它。

You have probably observed a modern variation of this at conferences: people who see something useful being projected up on the screen take a snapshot of it with their mobile phones. They do this in order to create a resource – so that they don’t have to commit it to memory. I sometimes do this with WiFi codes in public places on the assumption that in the 10 paces it takes to go from where the code is printed to the place where I am sitting, I will have forgotten it.

坏消息是，我们正处于一个学习需求被系统性地消除的时代。好消息是，如果你是一名学习专业人士，那么这就是你的工作（或者可能恰恰相反）。

The bad news is that we are living through an era where the need to learn is being systematically eliminated. The good news is that if you’re a learning professional, that’s now your job (or maybe it’s the other way around).

要理解为什么学习被抹杀，想象一下你在 20 世纪 80 年代经营一家伦敦出租车公司。你的每位出租车司机都需要具备知识——一项艰巨的认证，证明他们非常熟悉 60,000 多条街道和 100,000 多个著名景点。当然，拥有这种能力的人拥有相当稀缺的技能。他们可以拿到一定的薪水。

To understand why learning is being erased, imagine that you are running a London taxi company in the 1980s. Every single one of your cabbies needs to have The Knowledge – a gruelling accreditation, certifying that they are intimately familiar with over 60,000 streets and more than 100,000 places of note. Of course, someone with that kind of capability has a pretty scarce skill. They can command a certain salary.

然后有人发明了 GPS，一切都发生了变化：现在任何人都可以成为出租车司机。有了实时交通数据，他们甚至可以胜过经验丰富的伦敦出租车司机。你的整个商业模式发生了变化，然后一种新的商业模式出现了——Uber。

And then someone invents GPS and at a stroke everything changes: now anyone can be a taxi driver. With real-time traffic data they can even outperform experienced London cabbies. Your entire business model changes, and then a new business model springs up – Uber.

现在想象一下每项工作都有 GPS：每项工作都有 GPS 意味着资源和指导，让能力有限或没有能力的人能够快速上手，然后胜过拥有多年经验的员工。同时，我们的技术设计方式是无需手册即可交付。无需学习。

Now imagine GPS for every job: GPS for every job means resources and guidance that allow people with little or no capability to get up to speed very quickly, and then outperform employees with years of experience. At the same time, our technology is being designed in such a way that it ships with no manuals. Nothing to learn.

这一切让我们想起了 1894 年的马粪大危机。当时，伦敦街头有超过 11,000 辆马车运送乘客。此外，还有数千辆马车和约 50,000 匹马。每匹马每天可产生多达 16 公斤的粪便和约 2 升的尿液。这场危机已经达到了如此严重的程度，以至于《泰晤士报》在 1894 年自信地预测：“50 年后，伦敦的每条街道都将被 9 英尺厚的粪便埋葬”。但这种噩梦般的场景从未成为现实——相反，我们发现了汽车。

All this should remind us of the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894. At around this time there were in excess of 11,000 horse-drawn cabs transporting people around the streets of London. In addition, there were several thousand horse-drawn buses and an estimated 50,000 horses. Each of these horses produced anything up to 16 kilos of manure a day and around 2 litres of urine. The crisis had reached such proportions that in 1894 The Times confidently predicted: ‘In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure’. But this nightmarish scenario never materialized – instead we discovered the motor car.

大马粪危机的现代版是未来技能危机。2015 年，英国就业和技能委员会记录了技术工人长期短缺的情况。其他报告表明，到 2024 年，技术工人短缺人数将达到 400 万，无法满足需求^。2

The modern equivalent of the Great Horse Manure Crisis is the Future Skills Crisis. In 2015, the UK Commission on Employment and Skills catalogued a chronic shortage of skilled workers. Other reports suggest that by 2024 there will be four million too few skilled workers to meet demand.²

但未来不会出现技能危机。如果我们让（几乎）每一项工作都可以由几乎没有能力的人完成（除非自动化是更好的选择，或作为迈向自动化的垫脚石），就不会出现技能危机。

But there is no future skills crisis. Not if we make (almost) every job do-able by someone with next to no capability (unless automation is a better option, or as a stepping-stone on the way to automation).

认为这一过程（学习淘汰过程）只是偶然现象而非主题现象，仅仅是技术的副作用而非根本趋势，是错误的。人类正在系统地将知识外化，因此学习的需要减少了。这种活动有多种形式，例如提供情境敏感的指导、改进的用户体验设计、人机混合工作以及最终的自动化。

It is a mistake to see this process – the process of learning elimination – as incidental rather than thematic – as merely a side effect of technology rather than a fundamental trend. Human beings are systematically externalizing knowledge, so that their need to learn is reduced. This activity takes a variety of forms – for example the provision of context-sensitive guidance, improved user-experience design, hybrid human/AI working and, ultimately, automation.

我们之所以能做到这一点，是因为体内平衡。正如一开始所述，体内平衡描述了生物体为创造最佳生活条件所做的努力。例如，简单的多细胞生物可能会从太冷的环境迁移到更温暖的环境。随着生物体变得越来越复杂，它们能够在一定程度上独立于周围发生的事情来调节其内部环境。

We do this because of homeostasis. As described at the outset, homeostasis describes an organism’s efforts to create optimal living conditions. For example, simple multicellular organisms may move from environments that are too cold to ones that are warmer. As they grow in complexity, organisms are able to moderate, to some extent, their internal environment independently of what is happening around them.

学习代表着一种复杂的稳态机制——我们试图以复杂的方式适应环境——例如预测危险或寻找食物。但有了技术，我们拥有前所未有的自由来外部化稳态；创造一个能满足我们所有愿望的环境——换句话说，一个不需要学习的环境。

Learning represents a sophisticated homeostatic mechanism – our attempts to adapt to our environment in complex ways – for example to anticipate danger or find food. But with technology we have unprecedented latitude to externalize homeostasis; to create an environment that responds to our every desire – in other words, one that requires no learning.

举个例子，我小时候需要学习复杂的命令和编程语言才能与计算机通信，因此我们小时候学习编程技能是为了迎接需要与计算机通信的世界。但后来人们发明了触摸屏设备，这种设备非常简单，甚至三岁的孩子都会使用。学习复杂命令的需要就此消除。

As an example, when I was younger you needed to learn complicated commands and programming languages in order to communicate with computers, so as children we learned programming skills in anticipation of a world where we would need to communicate with computers. But then people invented touch-screen devices that were so simple that even a three-year-old child could use them. The need to learn complex commands was eliminated.

在人机交互方面，下一个前沿是语音：使用我们在婴儿时期发展起来的语言与机器交谈的能力。

In terms of human–computer interaction, the next frontier is voice: the ability to talk to machines using the same language that we develop as infants.

当我们想象未来时，很容易想象工作场所中会出现像亚马逊 Echo 这样的先进语音控制设备，提供专家的分步建议。但实际上，指导和资源可以简单得多：自动化之路的第一步是将特定角色的良好表现规范化——例如以简单的提示、清单或易于遵循的指导的形式。

When we imagine the future, it’s easy to picture sophisticated voice-controlled devices like Amazon’s Echo in the workplace, providing expert step-by-step advice. But actually, guidance and resources can be much simpler: a first step on the road to automation involves codifying what makes for good performance in a given role – for example in the form of simple tips, checklists or easy-to-follow guidance.

换句话说，我们可以通过构建简单易用的资源（如清单）来在很大程度上消除未来的技能危机。同样，尽管有那么多关于机器人取代你工作的可怕预言，但如果没有人真正花时间记录你今天是如何工作的，你就不必担心自动化。

In other words, we could largely erase the future skills crisis by building simple, easy-to-use resources such as checklists. Equally, despite all the dire predictions about robots taking your job, you don’t have to worry about automation if nobody has actually taken the time to transcribe how you do it today.

正如我所说，好消息是，至少在可预见的未来，学习专业人士完全有能力承担这项学习消除工作。我们有能力设计和创建资源和指导，以加速各种角色的绩效，为能够以流动的劳动力和较低的能力水平提供更高绩效的商业模式铺平道路——并且运营成本更低。如果你是一家企业，但你还没有这样做，你的竞争对手很快就会这样做。

As I say, the good news is that, at least for the foreseeable future, learning professionals are well positioned to undertake this learning elimination work. We possess the capabilities to design and create resources and guidance that accelerate performance in a wide variety of roles, paving the way for a business model that can deliver greater performance with a fluid workforce and lower levels of capability – and at lower operating costs. If you are a business and you aren’t already doing this, your competitors soon will be.

绩效咨询

Performance consulting

近年来，企业为减少学习需要的方法发明了一个名字：绩效咨询。从本质上讲，绩效咨询是埃及人使用的同一技巧的延伸——我们有证据表明，他们也以清单的形式外化知识，以避免人们必须学习信息。

In recent years, businesses have developed a name for the approach in which the need to learn is reduced: performance consulting. In essence performance consulting is an extension of the same trick used by the Egyptians – we have evidence that they, too, externalized knowledge in the form of checklists to avoid people having to learn information.

绩效咨询的工作方式是系统地识别最佳绩效所涉及的关键阶段，并改变绩效环境，使工作尽可能轻松完成。由于学习本身就需要付出努力，因此我们会尽可能地消除这种努力。

Performance consulting works by systematically identifying the critical stages involved in optimum performance and changing the performance context to make getting the job done as easy as possible. Since learning is inherently effortful, we remove this where we can.

这是一个日常例子：你需要在超市购买 50 件物品。你是要记住它们还是列出清单？记住它们是教育方法。它既费力又费时，不可靠，而且往往毫无意义。列出清单是绩效咨询方法——它快速、可靠，而且节省你的时间。它消除了学习的需要。

Here’s an everyday example: you have to buy 50 items at the supermarket. Are you going to memorize them or write a list? Memorizing them is the educational approach. It’s arduous, time-consuming, unreliable and often pointless. Making a list is the performance consulting approach – it’s quick, reliable and saves you time. It eliminates the need to learn.

请注意，绩效咨询不仅限于创建清单和指南（“绩效支持”），我们可能还想改变绩效环境的其他方面。要了解这是如何运作的，请再次考虑去超市购买 50 件商品的挑战。记住它们会耗费时间和精力（但你会在教育意义上学习）。

Note that performance consulting is not limited to creating checklists and guides (‘performance support’), we may also want to change other aspects of the performance context. To see how this works, consider once again the challenge of having to go to the supermarket to buy 50 items. Memorizing them all would be time-consuming and effortful (but you would be learning in the educational sense).

在项目开始时，我们必须决定学习是否有回报。如果你打算在十年内每周都购买相同的物品，那么可能会有回报——但你的购物清单很可能会改变，因此学习可能不是最好的方法。

At the start of a project, we have to make a decision as to whether learning will pay off. If you were going to be buying the same items every week for ten years, it might – but chances are your shopping list is going to change, so learning may not be the best approach.

绩效咨询方法建议使用检查表。这不仅比学习更快更容易，而且还能减少出错的机会。这就是为什么飞行员每次飞行时都要使用检查表。因此资源可以消除学习。

A performance consulting approach would suggest a checklist. Not only is this quicker and easier than learning, it reduces the chance of error. This is why aircraft pilots use checklists every time they fly. So resources eliminate learning.

但请注意，绩效咨询不必止步于资源：我们可以设计一台冰箱，为您创建购物清单。然后我们可能会想知道您为什么要购物，而是让冰箱将您的清单发送到您的超市，让他们在您进店时将物品送达。现在，您不仅不必记住清单，也不必学习如何在超市购物或开车。

But note that performance consulting need not stop with resources: we might design a fridge that creates the shopping list for you. We might then wonder why you were shopping at all, and instead have the fridge send your list to your supermarket for them to deliver the items when you are in. Now, not only do you not have to memorize the list, you don’t have to learn how to shop at a supermarket or drive a car.

当我们进行绩效咨询时，这种更广泛的范围很常见——我们最终会提出一系列建议，从绩效支持开始，一直延伸到流程或运营环境的更大变化。后者的改变成本往往更高，因此只有前者才能实施。

This broader scope is common when we do performance consulting – we end up with a range of recommendations starting with performance support, and extending to larger changes to process or operating environment. Oftentimes the latter are more costly to change, so it is only the former that are implemented.

不过，我需要重申一点：绩效咨询之所以能有效地提高绩效，是因为它能将能力和知识外化；改变我们周围的事物，这样我们就不需要学习，而是而不是改变我们。这意味着绩效咨询不会告诉我们任何有关学习的事情，不包含任何学习技巧，也不基于任何学习方法。这是一种回避所有这些问题的绝妙技巧。

One point I need to reiterate, though: performance consulting owes its effectiveness at improving performance to externalizing capability and knowledge; changing things around us so that we don’t need to learn, rather than changing us. This means that performance consulting tells us nothing about learning, includes no techniques for learning, and is not based on any approaches to learning whatsoever. It’s a wonderful technique for side-stepping all that.

当然，一个人记住一份清单并非不可能，就像一个人记住一张地铁地图并非不可能一样——但这些资源旨在鼓励相反的做法。如果你使用资源，你会比必须记住东西时学得更慢。因此，在每个旨在提高绩效的项目开始时，我们必须弄清楚我们是否想通过创造学习体验（并改变人们）或消除学习（并改变环境）来实现这一目标。

Of course it’s not impossible that someone might memorize a checklist, just as it is not impossible for someone to memorize a map of the underground – but these resources are designed to encourage the opposite. You will learn things more slowly if you are using a resource than if you had to commit things to memory. So at the beginning of every project aimed at improving performance we have to figure out if we want to do that by creating learning experiences (and changing people), or eliminating learning (and changing the context).

如果我认为将使用这种方法的“学习型专业人士”改名为“非学习型专业人士”，那就太不合时宜了，但严肃的一点是，我们作为一个专业人士的重点不应该是学习，而是表现和经验以及改变它们的各种技术。

It would be mischievous of me to suggest that ‘learning professionals’ using this approach should be renamed ‘unlearning professionals’, but the serious point is that our focus as a profession shouldn’t be learning, but performance and experience and the various techniques for changing them.

我发现许多人都难以接受这个观点——信息可能会阻碍学习，而不是鼓励学习；直觉上，他们觉得如果我们提供绩效支持，这必然会以某种方式帮助学习。让我们考虑以下假设情况，以便我们能够集中注意力于这一机制。

I have found that many people struggle with this idea – that information might discourage learning rather than encourage it; intuitively they feel that if we provide performance support this will inevitably aid learning somehow. Let’s consider the following hypothetical situation so that we can bring the mechanism into focus.

想象一下记住无理数 Pi（3.141592……等）的千位小数的任务。很少有人会这样做。为什么呢？答案是成本高——这是一件非常费力和困难的事情——而收益低——这不是我们需要经常做的事情，如果我们这样做，记住它很少会有很大的好处。

Imagine the task of learning the irrational number Pi (3.141592… etc) to one thousand places. This is the kind of thing that very few people would do. Why is that? The answer is that the cost is high – it’s a very laborious and difficult thing to do – and the benefit low – it’s not the kind of thing we need to do often, and if we do there is rarely a big benefit in having memorized it.

假设你从事的是绩效咨询工作，人们偶尔需要知道圆周率的第 337 位数字是多少。一个明智的做法是制作一份一页的文档，人们可以在需要时轻松访问，让他们可以随时查找圆周率。

So imagine you are performance consulting on a type of job where people occasionally need to know what, say, the 337th digit of Pi is. A sensible thing to do would be to produce a one-page document that people could easily access when they need it, enabling them to look up Pi whenever they need to.

现在，在提供这份文档几周后，如果你再去问人们：“嗯，你们学会了吗？！”，这会很奇怪。你的听众会奇怪地看着你：“我们当然没有学会！如果你希望我们学会，提供这份快速参考有什么意义呢？事实上，现在我们可以轻松地查阅，学习它的必要性比以往任何时候都要小！”

Now, it would be very odd to go back to people, a few weeks after providing this document and say: ‘Well – have you learned it yet!?’ Your audience would look at you oddly: ‘Of course we haven’t learned it! What was the point of providing the quick reference if you expect us to learn it!? In fact, now we can easily look it up there is less need than ever to learn it!’

所以你看，你实际上通过提供资源降低了人们学习的可能性。本质上，这是因为人们是认知吝啬鬼，如果有比记忆更简单的替代方法，他们就会选择它。

So you see, you have actually reduced the likelihood that people will learn by providing the resource. In essence this is because people are cognitive misers, and if there is an easier alternative to memorizing something, they will take it.

但有些人仍然会问我：“但在某些情况下提供资源肯定可以鼓励学习吧？”

But some people still come back to me and say: ‘But surely there are some circumstances in which providing resources encourages learning?’

答案是，如果好处大于成本，学习者总是可以选择记住一些东西——但好的资源的全部意义在于通过降低不记住某些东西的成本来阻止这种做法。这就是为什么伦敦地铁地图阻止我学习路线——它如此容易获得（在墙上，在我的设备上），并且如此易于使用，以至于我参考的成本实际上非常小。

The answer is that learners can always choose to memorize something if the benefit outweighs the cost – but the whole point of good resources is to discourage this by reducing the cost of not memorizing something. This is why the London Underground map prevents me from learning routes – it’s so accessible (on the wall, on my device) and so easy to use that there really is very little cost to me referring.

矛盾的是，资源越差（如果难以理解或找到），就越有可能鼓励学习（因为你提高了参考成本并使记忆变得相对有吸引力）。

Paradoxically, the worse a resource is – if it’s hard to understand or find – the more likely it is to encourage learning (because you have raised the cost of referring and made memorizing relatively attractive).

为了了解其工作原理，让我们设想一下某人使用Pi 资源进行学习的情况：想象有人是数学迷——痴迷于数学，非常关心数学，并且是志同道合的人组成的俱乐部的成员。他们为自己的才能感到自豪——但与几乎所有人类一样，他们本能地关心同龄人对他们的看法。

To see how this works, let’s consider a context in which someone would use our Pi resource to learn: imagine someone who is a maths nerd – someone who obsesses over mathematics, cares deeply about it and is part of a club of like-minded individuals. They pride themselves on their prowess – but like almost all humans they instinctively care what their peers think of them too.

他们意识到，记住圆周率的一千位数字是炫耀自己并赢得同伴尊重和钦佩的绝佳方式。尽管日复一日地记住这些数字的成本很高，但他们还是投入了大量时间，因为这样做的好处非常多。

They realize that memorizing Pi to a thousand places would be a great way to show off and win respect and admiration from their fellows. Despite the significant cost of – night after night – committing the numbers to memory, they put in the hours because the benefits are so great.

你明白这是怎么回事吗？挑战和人们关心的事情推动了学习。因此，尽管绩效咨询的目标始终是将知识和能力外化，但如果人们足够关心，就没有什么可以阻止他们学习。如果你想让某人学习，你就需要让他们关心。

Do you see how this works? It is the challenge, and the things that people care about that drive learning. So whilst performance consulting aims always at externalizing knowledge and capability, there is nothing to stop people learning if they care sufficiently. If you wanted someone to learn, you’d need to make them care.

这就是绩效咨询单独进行时存在局限性的地方。你默认人们关心的是固定不变的——但如果一个人关心患者的结果，他们可能会使用检查表，而另一个人不关心，就不会使用。改变人们关心的是学习设计，其余的取决于他们。

This is where performance consulting, in isolation, is limited. You are tacitly assuming that what people care about is fixed – but if one person cares about patient outcomes they may use the checklist, whilst another who does not, will not. Changing what people care about is learning design, the rest is up to them.

只关注任务的危险

The dangers of focusing on tasks alone

虽然绩效咨询是提高绩效的一种快速方法，但对绩效和任务的关注意味着它总是会忽略影响一个人行为的所有因素，因此其影响潜力总是有限的。

Whilst performance consulting is a quick way to improve performance, the focus on performance and tasks means that it will always miss the complete set of things that affect how a person behaves, and so will always be limited in its potential for impact.

为了说明这一点，我们可以想象一下第一天上学的小孩。绩效咨询方法会逐一确定实现目标的“关键路径”上的任务，然后分析使实现目标更容易的变化。

To see this, consider a small child on their first day of school. A performance consulting approach would identify one by one the tasks on the ‘critical path’ to achieving their goals, then analyse the changes that would make achieving these easier.

例如，新生可能需要识别他们的老师——在公共区域张贴一张带有照片和姓名的教职员工照片集可能会有所帮助。他们需要按时上课，因此打印的个性化时间表会很方便。他们可能不熟悉学校的布局，因此学校地图——甚至可能是在地板上画的线条——会帮助新生按时上课。

For example, new students might need to identify their teachers – a gallery of staff with pictures and names posted in communal areas might help. They need to get to classes on time, so a printed personalized timetable would be handy. They may be unfamiliar with the layout, so a school map – perhaps even lines painted on the floor – would help a new student get to classes on time.

所有这些事情都是有益的，并且将显著提高一系列关键指标的绩效。

All these things are good to do and will measurably improve performance against a number of key metrics.

但绩效咨询不会分析和解决问题，而这些问题才是推动学习的最终动力。如果你和新生交谈，你会发现他们真正担心的是融入社会、交朋友、不让自己难堪、看起来很酷、穿得让人印象深刻、说正确的话、不让父母生他们的气等等（有趣的是，这些几乎与成年人加入新组织时的担忧相同）。

But what performance consulting doesn’t do is analyse and address concerns – and these are what are ultimately driving learning. If you talk to new students, you will learn that what they are really worried about is fitting in, making friends, not embarrassing themselves, looking cool, dressing in a way that impresses people, saying the right things, not having their parents be mad at them and so on (interestingly these are almost identical to the concerns adults have when joining a new organization).

如果你理解了这些问题，你就可以设计出一大堆额外的经验和资源来解决它们。绩效咨询不是一种旨在揭示或解决问题的方法，因此它总是会错过很大一部分。当然，孩子们想按时上课，但如果你不理解为什么，那么你很容易设计出错误的解决方案。

If you understand these concerns, there are a whole host of additional experiences and resources that you can design to address them. Performance consulting is not an approach designed to surface or address concerns, so it will always miss a big piece of the picture. Sure, kids want to get to class on time, but if you don’t understand why then you can easily design the wrong solution.

相反，你可能很难理解为什么孩子们得到了所有正确的表现支持却仍然迟到。这可能是故意的——他们想看起来很酷，经常迟到是他们“叛逆”形象的一部分。

Conversely you might struggle to understand why kids with all the right performance support are nevertheless turning up late. It might be that this is deliberate – that they want to look cool, and being regularly late to class is part of their ‘rebel’ image.

尽管存在缺点，但绩效咨询与传统教育相比还是向前迈出了一大步。那么，是什么阻止学习专业人士采用这种方法呢？这种方法可以显著提高绩效、胜任时间、生产力和员工体验——这些都是企业领导者最关心的问题。那么为什么不呢？

Despite its shortcomings, performance consulting is a huge step forward from conventional education. So what stops learning professionals embracing this approach? It’s an approach that dramatically improves performance, time to competence, productivity and employee experience – all top concerns for business leaders. So why not?

简而言之，对于那些对学习有感情的人来说，转向学习消除是困难的。放弃我们的工作就是把知识灌输到人们头脑中的（教育）观念。从培养个人能力转向培养组织能力对我们来说很困难。

In short, it’s tough for people with an emotional attachment to learning to switch to learning elimination. To let go of the (educational) idea that somehow our job is about getting knowledge into people’s heads. It’s tough for us to switch from building individual capability to building organizational capability.

但如果我们能够放手，我们就能成为组织需要的未来架构师，并首次对绩效和员工体验产生真正的积极影响。如果我们不这样做，那么提供“绩效指导系统”的公司很有可能会迅速取代学习和发展在提高绩效方面的作用。

But if we can let go, we can become the future architects that our organizations need, and for the first time have a genuinely positive effect on performance and employee experience. If we don’t, there is every likelihood that companies offering ‘performance guidance systems’ will rapidly replace the role of learning and development in delivering improved performance.

你可能对我所说的一些内容有点担心——这是正确的。虽然在大多数情况下，消除学习需求是提高绩效的快速途径，但有时我们可能想要改变人们——例如，让他们为组织变革做好准备，改变他们对重要事情的看法，或者仅仅因为我们关心他们的成长。

You may be a bit worried about some of what I have said – and rightly so. Whilst eliminating the need to learn is a fast track to performance in the majority of cases, there may be times when we want to transform people – for example to prepare them for organization change, to change the way they feel about something important, or simply because we care about their growth.

要改变人们，我们需要设计一种对他们来说重要的体验。在下一章中，我们将研究如何做到这一点。

To change people, we need to design an experience that matters to them. In the next chapter we will look at how to do this.

“找到你所爱的东西并让它杀死你。”

‘Find what you love and let it kill you.’

查尔斯·布考斯基

CHARLES BUKOWSKI

作为一个从未被社交生活困扰过的人，我承认我很难理解为什么人们要花那么多时间在社交上，我的意思是——聚会、社交、会议——老实说，我只能忍受这么多肤浅的闲聊，然后我就想用一条大鱼打别人。

As someone who has never been terribly troubled by social life, I confess I struggle to understand why people devote so much time to it, I mean – parties, socializing, meetings – honestly, there is only so much superficial chit-chat I can stomach before I feel like slapping someone with a large fish.

当然，我可以想象人们可能有用的情况，但总的来说，我尽量减少与他人的互动，以便专注于重要的事情：例如学习、认知、哲学、神经科学和未来。到目前为止，这对所有相关人员来说都相当有效——我会考虑这些事情，人们不会邀请我参加聚会。

Certainly I can envisage situations in which people might be useful, but by and large I try and keep my interactions to a minimum so that I can focus on the things that matter: like for example learning, cognition, philosophy, neuroscience and the future. So far this has worked out fairly well for everyone concerned – I think about stuff like that, and people don’t invite me to parties.

在上一章中，我们讨论了个体差异：但这些差异是如何产生的？是什么让你变成了今天这个样子？如果我想改变你，我该怎么做？

In the previous chapter we talked about individual differences: but how do those differences come about? What made you the person you are today – and if I wanted to change you, how would I do that?

为了便于讨论，我们设想一下，人们在人生的起步阶段拥有一个“关怀点池”，他们可以选择将这个“关怀点池”花在他们可能遇到的一系列经验类别上，例如“人”、“常规”、“数字”、“理论”、“视觉体验”或“音乐”等等。例如，如果你将所有关怀点都花在“人”类别上，那么你就会成为一个非常善于社交的人，成为聚会的灵魂人物，不断渴望社交互动，对周围人的情绪很敏感，但对电子表格却毫无用处，对后现代哲学也知之甚少。

Imagine, for the sake of argument, that people start out in life with a ‘pool’ of ‘care points’ that they can choose to spend on a number of classes of experience that they may encounter – things like ‘people’ or ‘routines’ or ‘numbers’ or ‘theories’ or ‘visual experience’ or ‘music’ and so on. If, for example, you spend all your care points on the ‘people’ category, then you become a tremendously social person – the life and soul of the party – constantly craving social interaction and sensitive to the moods of people around you, but useless with a spreadsheet and with very little to say about postmodern philosophy.

我使用“为了论证”这个表达，因为虽然我不知道有任何研究表明我们拥有类似护理点池的东西，但我想说这是一个有用的类比。

I use the expression ‘for the sake of argument’ because although I am not aware of any research that suggests we have something like a pool of care points, I would like to suggest that this is a useful analogy.

我们确实知道，研究结果充分支持了这一发现，即大脑具有多个功能专门化的区域，¹对一些人来说，大脑中的大部分区域都相互影响——例如，如果你的大脑中有很大一部分区域专门用于社交互动，那么你可能在其他方面就不那么擅长了，这在一定程度上取决于大脑中哪些区域往往相邻。这就是为什么对神经科学家来说，没有什么比迪斯科更糟糕的了。

What we do know to be well supported by research is the finding that the brain has a number of areas of functional specialization,¹ which to some extent encroach on each other – so for example having a large area of your brain dedicated to social interaction may mean that you are not quite as good at something else, depending in part on which areas of the brain tend to sit next to each other. This is why there is nothing worse than a disco for neuroscientists.

因此，如果我们乐于将情感意义视为一种或多或少整体的功能方式 - 换句话说，各种刺激，无论是社会刺激还是视觉刺激，都是根据其情感意义进行处理的，那么你就会得到类似我所提出的积分系统的东西。

As a result, if we are happy to think of affective significance as being a more or less global way of functioning – in other words various stimuli whether social or visual for example – are processed in terms of their affective significance, then you arrive at something like my proposed points system.

如果你玩过角色扮演类游戏（无论是像《龙与地下城》这样的骰子游戏还是电脑游戏），你就会认出这种角色创建方法：你有 20 分，可以分配给力量、敏捷、魅力等特征。但其中一项越多，其他的就越少。

If you have ever played role-based games (whether dice-based games like Dungeons & Dragons or computer-based games) you will recognize this approach to character creation: you have, say, 20 points that you can allocate to characteristics such as strength, agility, charisma and so on. But more of one means less of the others.

当我打出这些字时，我意识到如果你是购买了这本书的人，那么这个系统对你来说可能很熟悉，而如果你是社交能力很强的人，那么你年轻时可能不会坐在地下室玩《龙与地下城》，而且现在你不会读这本书，而是出去交朋友。到目前为止，一切都很好。

As I type this, I realize that if you are the kind of person who has purchased this book, then this system may well be familiar to you, whereas if instead you are the kind of person with great social skills then you were probably not sitting in a basement playing Dungeons & Dragons during your youth and are – right now – not reading this book, but instead out making friends. So far, so good.

所有这些的意义在于，以这种方式思考情感意义可能有助于我们理解神经多样性。假设某人将所有情感意义点都放在“常规”上（假设大脑中有一部分专门处理常规），会发生什么情况？这些人对常规及其中的细微变化非常敏感，对常规的中断感到非常不安，并且几乎不会注意到人和社交情况。

The point of all this is that thinking about affective significance in this way may well help us to understand neurodiversity. What would happen, say, if someone put all of their affective significance points into ‘routine’ (let’s assume there is a part of the brain specialized for handling routine). These would then be people who are tremendously sensitive to routine and small variations in them, become very upset at disruption to routines, and hardly seem to notice people and social situations.

我们认识这样的人吗？是的，我们认识——在最极端的情况下，我们描述了一些自闭症特征。

Do we know people like this? Yes, we do – at the extreme end of the spectrum we are describing some autistic characteristics.

同样，我们也知道有些人把所有的“情感背景”点数都用在社交技能上。这些人在社交刺激下茁壮成长，并且很乐意将社交互动作为探索世界的一种方式，而不是例行公事。

Likewise, we also know people who spend all their ‘affective context’ points on social skills. These are people who thrive on social stimuli and are quite happy to use social interaction as a means to navigate the world rather than, say, routine.

个体差异

Individual differences

我们有时会陷入用“类型”或诊断类别来思考个体差异的陷阱：自闭症和注意力缺陷多动障碍（ADHD）就是两个典型的例子。近年来，在基因组分析使得我们能够理解这些表面分类背后的遗传因素。

We sometimes fall into the trap of thinking of individual differences in terms of ‘types’ or diagnostic categories: autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) being two topical examples. In recent years, advances in genome analysis have made it possible to understand the contributing genetic factors underlying these superficial categorizations.

没有一种心理类型是单一基因的产物。尽管心理变异有很大的遗传成分，但这是数千个基因相互作用的产物。换句话说，没有单一基因导致“自闭症”，也没有单一基因导致“健康”——只是有很多基因造成了一些差异。

No psychological type is the product of a single gene. Although there is a strong genetic component to psychological variation, this is the product of the interactions between thousands of genes. In other words there is no single gene for ‘autism’, any more than there is a single gene for ‘healthy’ – there are just lots of genes that make a bit of difference.

这意味着，像“自闭症”或“躁狂抑郁症”这样的分类，就好比说身高超过 6 英尺 2 英寸的所有人都是“高”，身高低于 6 英尺 2 英寸的所有人都是“矮”。这是一种武断的区分。

This means that a categorization like ‘autistic’ or ‘manic-depressive’ is exactly like saying that everyone over 6 foot 2 inches in height is ‘tall’, and everyone beneath that ‘short’. It’s an arbitrary distinction.

尽管我们基因里所关注的事物各不相同，但它们通常都符合正态分布。这种分布的极端值是“超能力”。在游戏环境中，将所有点数都花在一种特性上——例如“隐身”或“力量”，会导致角色在很多情况下表现糟糕，但在某个狭窄的范围内却几乎是超人。

Although the things we are genetically inclined to care about vary, they often do so according to a normal distribution. At the extremes of this distribution are the ‘superpowers’. In a gaming context, spending all your points on one characteristic – such as ‘stealth’ or ‘strength’ results in a character who is rubbish in a whole host of situations but seems almost superhuman in a narrow range.

想象一下如果有人说“去他的吧 – 我要把我所有的情感点数花在数字或者音乐上！”那会发生什么？

Imagine someone who said ‘to hell with it – I’m going to spend all my affective context points on numbers, or on music!’ what would happen then?

我们的模型表明，通过对大多数人来说意义不大的刺激赋予过度的情感意义，这些人将表现出非凡的能力——例如，在普通人看来是“过目不忘”或“音乐天才”或成为人类计算器的能力。换句话说，就是自闭症专家。

Our model would suggest that by virtue of attaching inordinate affective significance to stimuli that are only moderately significant to most people, such people would demonstrate extraordinary abilities – for example something that appears to average people to be ‘photographic memory’ or ‘musical genius’ or the ability to be a human calculator. Autistic savants, in other words.

这些人之所以有这些能力，是因为他们确实能感受到你我感受不到的差异。对你来说，数字 3765342 和 3864521 可能感觉不到太大差异。但对于一个把所有情感意义点都花在数字上的人来说，它们的感觉就像山羊和狗对你的感觉一样不同。这使得他们能够以令你我惊讶的方式存储和处理它们。

These individuals have these abilities because they literally feel differences that you and I don’t. To you, the numbers 3765342 and 3864521 may not feel very different. But to someone you has spent all their affective significance points on numbers, they feel as different as – say – goats and dogs do to you. This enables them to store and process them in ways that are astonishing to you and me.

作为一个爱管闲事的家长，一个人可能会对数字或音乐等事物产生情感上的影响，从而发展出不同寻常的能力。以我自己为例，不用过多担心别人，可能就腾出了一些时间来学习理论和哲学。难怪哲学家们如此普遍地寻求超越日常交往中普遍存在的愚蠢行为。

It is probably also true that as a pushy parent, one might drive affective significance for something like numbers or music, so that a person developed an unusual level of ability in that area. In my own case, not worrying too much about people has probably freed up some bandwidth for learning theory and philosophy. Little wonder that philosophers so commonly seek to rise above the apparent silliness that pervades everyday interaction.

总之，我们个体的差异很大程度上取决于我们关心的事情。我的意思不只是显而易见的，而是更具体的技术意义上的，即我们的大脑倾向（无论是通过我们对不同刺激类别赋予情感意义的能力（无论是先天还是后天）决定了我们会成为什么样的人。从字面上看，你是由你关心的事物定义的。人类表现出的高度神经可塑性使我们每个人都能开发出一套独特的重要事物，这反过来又定义了我们的个性，并控制着我们的认知。

In summary, our individual differences depend in large part on the things we care about. I don’t mean this just in the obvious sense, but in the more specific technical sense in which the tendency of our brains (whether through nature or nurture) to attach affective significance to different classes of stimuli determines the kind of person that we become. You are, quite literally, defined by the things you care about. The high degree of neuroplasticity that humans exhibit enables each of us to develop a unique portfolio of stuff that matters, which in turn defines our personality, and governs our cognition.

在一个人们如此热衷于旧事物的世界里，很难理解新的学习观念。想象一下，查尔斯·达尔文站在一群人面前，这些人一生都相信自己是上帝的创造物——认为他们的祖先是猿猴。当然，反驳的声音是无穷无尽的；但直到现在我们才能看清他们的真实面目。然而，当我们嘲笑他们对宗教教义的执着时，我们完全忽视了我们自己的教义。

It is difficult to grasp a new conception of learning in a world where so much emotion is invested in the old. Picture if you will, Charles Darwin standing before an audience of people, all of whom had spent their entire lives believing themselves to be God’s creation – suggesting that their ancestors were apes. There were, of course, no end of counter-arguments; but only now can we see them for what they really were. But while we scoff at their attachment to religious doctrine, we entirely overlook our own.

这里缺少的是“玩乐”：当我们不再玩乐时，我们开始对事物赋予巨大的个人意义，然后改变我们的观点的代价就变得太大了。教育在剥夺我们的玩乐精神的同时，也剥夺了我们发展和学习的能力。我们变成了因观点受到挑战而感到被冒犯和威胁的人。化石。

What is missing here is ‘play’: when we cease to be playful, we begin to attach tremendous personal significance to things, and then the cost of changing our opinion becomes too great. Education, in robbing us of playfulness, simultaneously strips us of the ability to develop and learn. We become people offended and threatened by challenges to our views. Fossils.

情感情境模型的应用

Applications of the affective context model

当我们开始将情感情境模型应用到我们自己的生活中时，很快就会发现有些事情比其他事情更重要。几年前，我决定带我九岁的女儿去附近的森林散步。“那一定很棒，”我想。“对她来说，花些时间接触大自然很重要，”我推断道。

When we start to apply the affective context model to our own lives, it quickly becomes apparent that some things are more significant than others. Some years ago, I decided to take my nine-year-old daughter for a walk in the nearby forest. ‘It will be lovely,’ I thought. ‘It’s important for her to spend some time in nature,’ I reasoned.

于是我劝她放下 iPad，和我一起散步。走了二十分钟后，她开始抱怨自己身体疲惫不堪，快要崩溃了。不久之后，她开始担心我们迷失在荒野中，再也找不到回到文明世界的路了。

So I persuaded her to put down her iPad and come with me on the walk. Twenty minutes in, she began complaining that she was physically exhausted and close to collapse. Shortly thereafter she began to worry that we were hopelessly lost in the wilderness and would never again find our way back to civilization.

我感觉这场关于我们如何靠松果、浆果和棍子上的松鼠为生的谈话很有启发，但最终却让人感到不安。之后，我放弃了这次散步，她后来将其描述为有史以来最糟糕的经历。

After what I felt was an instructive but ultimately non-reassuring chat about how we might conceivably live on pine cones, berries and squirrel-on-a-stick, I abandoned the walk which she later described as The Worst Experience, Ever.

回程让我有时间思考，我到底为什么觉得带她去树林里散步很重要。我熟练地屏蔽了痛苦和悲伤的声音，想出了很多理由：“新鲜空气对她有好处”、“锻炼有益”、“每个人都应该应该学会欣赏自然”等等——但事实上这些都是合理化的说法，我内心只是觉得这是应该做的事。那么我为什么会觉得这是应该做的事呢？

The return journey gave me time to reflect on why, exactly, I had felt it important to take her for a walk in the woods. Expertly tuning out the sounds of misery and distress, I was able to come up with any number of reasons: ‘The fresh air will do her good’, ‘Exercise is beneficial’, ‘Everyone should learn to appreciate nature’ and so on – but the truth is these were all rationalizations, at heart I just felt that it was the right thing to do. So why did I feel that it was the right thing to do?

许多人都带着孩子去看足球比赛。我不明白为什么。我的意思是，谁愿意在交通拥堵中挣扎，一边大声咒骂一边努力寻找停车位，花掉辛苦赚来的钱支付高昂的票价，只为了有机会像牛群一样被赶进人群中，被迫在很远的地方观看一场毫无意义的比赛（无论如何，他们可以舒适地坐在沙发上观看）？但那只是我的想法。

Many people take their kids to football matches. I can’t imagine why. I mean who would willingly battle through extreme traffic, extending their repertoire of curse-words as they struggle to find a place to park, parting with their hard-earned cash to pay extortionate ticket prices for the chance to be herded like cattle into a mass of people who are forced to watch a pointless sport at a great distance (which in any case they could watch from the comfort of the sofa)? But then, that’s just me.

如果你反思自己的生活，你就会意识到某些经历——我称之为基石经历——具有某种深刻而绝对的意义。这并不是说它们真的很重要（尽管你无疑可以想出它们为什么重要的原因）——而是你觉得有义务与重要的人分享或传给你的孩子的那种经历。它们可能是钓鱼、家庭传统、体育赛事或宗教仪式。

If you reflect on your own life you will realize that certain experiences – what I will call cornerstone experiences – have a kind of deep and absolute significance. It is not that they are really important (though doubtless you can come up with reasons why they are important) – rather they are the kinds of experiences that you feel obliged to share with significant others or pass on to your children. They may be fishing, or family traditions, or sporting events, or religious observances.

这些基础体验往往（尽管不一定）是在童年时期形成的。很难说它们到底有什么特点——除了它们在情感上是自我维持的，并被驱使着去重现。我的意思是，我们被吸引着去再次实践它们，并将它们传递给他人。我的父母带我去树林里散步——现在我觉得这也是我应该和我女儿一起做的事情。

Quite often – though not necessarily – these cornerstone experiences will have been laid down in childhood. It is hard to say what exactly characterizes them – except that they are emotionally self-sustaining, and driven to reproduce. What I mean by that is that we are drawn to act them out again, and to pass them on to others. My parents took me for walks in the woods – and now I feel that that is something I should do with my daughter.

值得注意的是，这与习惯无关；我没有独自在树林里散步的习惯。这也不是理性的行为——当然，我可以想出在树林里散步的好处，但如果我暗示这些真的是我的动机，那我就是在撒谎。

It is worth noting that this is not about habit; I am not in the habit of going for walks in the woods on my own. Neither is it rational behaviour – of course I can come up with reasons why walking in the woods is good, but I would be lying if I implied that these are truly my motivations.

这种情感机制有时是关系困难的核心：一对年轻情侣相遇、约会，并在一段适当的时间后结婚。事情一开始很好，然后裂缝开始出现。简曾多次要求戴夫为厨房整理一些额外的搁架，但他一直没有时间。

This affective mechanism sometimes lies at the heart of relationship difficulties: a young couple meet, date, and after a suitable amount of time get married. Things are fine for a while, then cracks begin to emerge. Jane has asked Dave on several occasions to sort out some additional shelving for the kitchen, but he just hasn’t got round to it.

事实上，戴夫没有做很多事情，这让简感到沮丧——例如，他经常忘记把垃圾桶拿出来。所以简会唠叨他。戴夫开始觉得简所做的一切都是唠叨。他不明白为什么垃圾桶这么重要，简却不亲自把它们拿出来。虽然他说过他会安装架子，但他从来没有真正喜欢过 DIY，他对整个事情的焦虑（“我需要买电动工具吗？”）阻碍了他。

In fact there are a whole list of things that Dave hasn’t done that cause Jane to feel frustrated – for example, he often forgets to take out the bins. So Jane nags him. For his part, Dave has started to feel that all Jane does is nag. He doesn’t see why if the bins are such a big deal, Jane doesn’t take them out herself. And although he did say he would put up the shelves, he’s never really been into DIY, and his anxiety about the whole thing (‘Do I need to buy power tools?’) is holding him back.

除此之外，简的一些事情开始让他感到烦恼——她的厨艺让人很失望（尽管当他最后一次暗示这一点时，简最终建议他自己做饭）。

In addition to that, there are a few things that have begun to bug him about Jane – her cooking leaves much to be desired (though when he last hinted at this, it ended with Jane suggesting that he do the cooking himself).

有一天，当他们都感到有点压力时，他们大吵了一架，这些事情都暴露了出来。但他们争吵的核心可能是一系列基本经验。例如，简的父亲在家里很能干，总是倒垃圾。戴夫的母亲以她的厨艺为荣。不知不觉中，这些关于伴侣应该如何的情绪已经导致挫败感的积累。

One day, when they are both feeling a little stressed, they have a big row and all these things come out. But what lies at the heart of their dispute is probably a set of cornerstone experiences. Jane’s dad, for example, was handy around the house and always took out the bins. Dave’s mum took pride in her cooking. Without even realizing it, these sentiments about how a partner should be have caused frustration to build up.

请注意，简和戴夫并没有意识到他们正在进行的这种比较；他们很可能并没有列出彼此的缺点清单（但愿没有！）——而只是一种逐渐积累的恼怒和不满的感觉，一种情感上的失调。

Note that Jane and Dave aren’t consciously aware of this comparison that they are drawing; in all likelihood they haven’t both drawn up a list of shortcomings (let’s hope not!) – rather it is just a feeling of annoyance and dissatisfaction that builds up, a kind of affective dissonance.

他们随后可能会去接受夫妻治疗，治疗师可能会有意识地将所有这些都带到表面——但关键是，就像我们法官的判决例子一样，机制是情感的；思想只是让无意识变成有意识。

They might subsequently go into couples’ therapy, and the therapist might have the sense to bring all this to the surface – but the key thing is that rather like our judges’ verdicts example, the mechanics are emotional; the thoughts just make the unconscious, conscious.

请注意，为了取得进展，夫妻必须进行某种“情感映射”练习——通过谈论他们的感受和讲述他们过去的故事，他们浮现出对他们来说重要的事情。显然，如果他们在结婚前这样做会是个好主意——但我认为可能有更系统、更科学的方式来做到这一点。想象一下，如果我们在人们进入教育系统时对他们这样做。

Notice that to make progress the couple have to do a sort of ‘affective mapping’ exercise – through talking through their feelings and telling stories about their past they surface the things that matter to them. Obviously it would be a good idea if they did that before getting married – but I would suggest that there might be a more systematic, more scientific way of doing it. Just imagine if we did this with people as they entered an education system.

这些基石体验可能在一个人成长过程中的某些可识别的点上奠定，例如第一天上学，或第一次领导团队。当我们与孩子分享这些深刻体验时，我们可能为他们的行为方式以及教导他人的行为方式奠定了基础。这是一门极不精确的科学：我们无法确定他们会如何反应，而且是他们的反应，而不是体验本身，才是变革性的。

These cornerstone experiences may be laid down at recognizable points in a person’s development – for example their first day at school, or their first experience of leading a team. When we share powerful experiences with our children, we may be laying the foundations for the way they behave and teach others to behave. It’s a woefully inexact science: we cannot be sure of how they will react, and it is their reaction – not the experience itself that is transformative.

当他们第一次做某件事时，情况可能尤其如此。在这些不确定的情况下，他们可能处于不稳定的状态，而且非常容易改变。

This may be especially true when they are doing something for the first time. In these uncertain situations they may be in a fluid state, and quite malleable.

让人们处于这种流动状态（或发现他们处于这种状态）对于塑造一个人的个性至关重要。在我们的一生中，我们大部分时间都会发现自己在轨道上奔跑，遵守规范，做着别人对我们的期望。正是在我们不知道会发生什么的时候，我们定义了自己。

Putting people into this fluid state – or spotting when they are in it – is critical in shaping an individual’s personality. For most of our lives we will find ourselves running on rails, conforming to norms, and doing what is expected of us. It is at times when we do not know what to expect that we define ourselves.

虽然基石体验可能是我们精神地产中一些可识别的地标，但还有许多较小、不太永久的占用者。

Whilst cornerstone experiences may be some of the recognizable landmarks in our mental real estate, there are many smaller less permanent occupants.

模因还是女性？从大体验到小推动

Memes or femes? From big experiences to small nudges

作者理查德·道金斯创造了“模因”一词来描述以类似于基因的方式生存和繁殖的思想。一个例子可能是人类思维有点像计算机的想法。关键在于模因的存在独立于其宿主——与基因一样，模因通过从一个人传给另一个人而生存。

The author Richard Dawkins coined the term ‘memes’ to describe ideas that survive and reproduce in a way that is similar to genes. An example might be the idea that the human mind works a bit like a computer. The point is that the meme has an existence that is independent of its host – and rather like genes, memes survive by being passed from one person to another.

但如果我们的想法确实是由情感反应构建的，我们就会发现模因的真正本质远远超出了想法的范围；事实上，任何一组能够成功地从一个宿主传播到另一个宿主并存活下来的情感反应都可以成为模因。

But if it is true that our ideas are built from our affective responses, we can see that the real nature of memes extends far beyond ideas; in fact, any set of affective responses that can successfully travel from one host to another and survive can be a meme.

虽然这听起来有点奇怪，但请想一想，“模因”这个表达最近变得很流行，用于描述带有幽默字幕的图片。这些图片在社交媒体群组中流传，通常通过“赞成”或“反对”投票获得成功，其中更受欢迎的图片会通过 Facebook 或 Instagram 等平台迅速传播。流行的模因可能是一只戴着领结的可爱狗狗的照片，与人击掌，并配上字幕“好狗狗”。

Although this may sound odd, consider for a second that the expression ‘meme’ has recently taken on a popular usage and is used to apply to humorously captioned pictures. These circulate in social media groups, and typically achieve success by being voted ‘up’ or ‘down’, with the more popular ones quickly spreading via platforms like Facebook or Instagram. A popular meme might be an image of a cute dog, wearing a bow-tie, performing a high five with the caption ‘good doggo’.

我的观点是，这些不是连贯思想意义上的模因——通常它们只是为了让我们发笑、感到震惊或惊讶而拼凑起来的。好的模因是可以理解的——这意味着它准确地捕捉到了你认识的感觉或情况。简而言之——它们与我们的想法无关，而与我们的感受息息相关。

My point is that these are not memes in the sense of coherent ideas – generally they are just put together to make us laugh, or feel shocked or surprised. A good meme is relatable – meaning that it accurately captures a feeling or situation that you recognize. In short – they have nothing to do with what we think and everything to do with what we feel.

你很难解释“乖狗狗”表情包所传达的理念。表情符号也是如此——我们最常用来表达情感的图标——最近人气飙升。

You would be hard pressed to explain the idea communicated by the ‘good doggo’ meme. The same is true of emojis – the icons we use most commonly to reflect our sentiments – which have recently experienced an explosive rise in popularity.

情感语境模型可以帮助我们理解正在发生的事情，无论是我们希望让后代经历我们小时候经历过的同样的事情，讲述火车上打架的故事，还是分享我们通过社交媒体收到的有趣图片。从本质上讲，模因不是想法——模因是感觉（“femes”？）。它们是强烈的反应足以存续并传承下去——例如作为一个故事、一句歌词或一幅图画。

The affective context model can help us to understand what is going on, whether it is our desire to subject our offspring to the same experiences that mattered to us as kids, to tell a story about a fight on a train, or to share an amusing picture we received via social media. At their core, memes are not ideas – memes are feelings (‘femes’?). They are reactions that are strong enough to persist, and to be passed on – for example as a story, as a song lyric, or as a picture.

Snapchat 或 TikTok 等社交媒体平台的奇特流行现在可以解释，这些平台主要关注人们的面部表情和对事件的反应。我们的面部表情是传达情感的最佳方式之一，将其与音乐和卡通效果结合起来可以加深影响力。

The curious popularity of social media platforms such as Snapchat or TikTok, which overwhelmingly centre on people’s facial expressions and reactions to events, is now explicable. Our faces are one of the best ways to convey an emotion, and combining them with music and cartoon effects deepens the impact.

情感表达与营销

Sentimental expression and marketing

情感表达的病毒性传播并非新鲜事。1963 年，越南佛教僧人释广德在西贡一个繁忙的十字路口坐下并开始自焚，这一行为的照片和描述传遍了世界各地。

The viral nature of sentimental expression is not a new phenomenon. When Thich Quang Duc, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, sat down at a busy road intersection in Saigon in 1963 and proceeded to set fire to himself, the pictures and descriptions of that act travelled around the world.

据报道，约翰·F·肯尼迪总统在与其兄弟通电话时得知了这一事件，他打断了谈话并大喊：“耶稣基督！”后来他评论道：“历史上没有任何新闻照片像这张一样在全世界引起如此大的轰动。”

President John F Kennedy learned of the incident whilst talking to his brother on the phone, reportedly interrupting the conversation to exclaim: ‘Jesus Christ!’, and later remarking: ‘No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.’

毋庸置疑，这一行为背后的意图——提高人们对政府迫害佛教僧侣的认识——是释迦牟尼的最终目标。但这一目的被情感力量所左右，尽管许多人仍然熟悉这些图像，但其政治目的却基本被遗忘了。与我们的老朋友赫拉克利特相比：具有讽刺意味的是，我们可能只能通过他死于粪堆的故事来了解他的形而上学哲学。

It goes without saying that intention behind the act – raising awareness of the persecution of Buddhist monks by the government – was Thich’s ultimate aim. But this purpose rode the coat tails of the emotional force, and whilst the images are still familiar to many, the political agenda has largely been forgotten. Compare this with our old friend Heraclitus: ironically we might only learn about his metaphysical philosophy by virtue of the story of his demise in a pile of dung.

在思考情感如何占据我们头脑的认知“空间”时，值得注意的是一个会一次又一次出现的主题：在光谱的一端，我们关注的是大众的吸引力和普遍的强势，而在光谱的另一端，我们关注的是谦逊，关注的是特定环境下的特定人关注的事情。

In thinking through these ways in which emotion occupies the cognitive ‘real estate’ of our minds, it is worth noting a theme which will come up time and time again: there is one end of the spectrum where we are looking at mass appeal and the generally powerful – and another end where it is humble and about what matters to a specific person in a specific context.

如果你给我看一张僧人自焚的照片，那应该是任何人都会记住的事情。另一方面，如果你给我看一张你最喜欢的度假胜地最喜欢的酒吧的照片，那对你来说是一种强烈的感觉，但我可能会忘记。

If you are showing me a photograph of a monk setting himself on fire, that is the sort of thing anyone would be expected to remember. If, on the other hand, you are showing me a picture of your favourite bar at your favourite holiday destination, that is a specific feeling powerful to you, but one which I will likely forget.

我们的关注点就像一棵树：树干由我们与其他人类和动物共同关注的核心问题组成，树枝则反映了我们个体的差异和发展。

Our concerns are organized rather like a tree: a trunk made up of the core concerns we share with other humans and animals, and branches which reflect our individual differences and development.

以营销为例，营销显然与情感有关。可以说，营销有两种类型：第一种是那种我们过去在电视或广告牌上看到的“哇”广告。这类广告只是针对大众市场，需要对最多的人产生最大的影响。因此，他们倾向于使用常见的情绪反应——性唤起、震惊、地位等等——这些情绪更接近我们的稳态根源。这是传统的营销世界。

Take marketing, which is more obviously all about emotion. Arguably there are two kinds of marketing: the first is the kind of ‘wow’ ads that we were used to seeing on TV or billboards. These are the kinds of ads that are just sprayed out to a mass market, and need to have maximum impact for the largest number of people. For that reason they have tended to use emotional reactions that are common denominators – sexual arousal, shock, status and so on – emotions that are nearer our homeostatic roots. This is the conventional world of marketing.

但有一个问题：营销并不是非常有效。只有一小部分人会因为营销而改变自己的行为。如果这听起来违反直觉，请记住，对于一家大公司来说，即使实现 0.5% 的销售额增长，也意味着一大笔钱——所以营销大致就是这样的。

But there is a problem with it: marketing isn’t terribly effective. Only a small percentage of people change their behaviour as a result of marketing. If this sounds counter-intuitive, remember that for a large company to achieve even a 0.5 per cent shift in sales can amount to a lot of money – so that’s roughly how it works.

但另一方面，在社交媒体和大数据的世界里，我们可以用一种非常不同的方式来运作：你可以给我发一个非常无聊、廉价的广告，但它却更有可能改变我的行为。为什么？因为这正是与我这个人、与我现在所处的境况有关的事情。

But at the other end of the spectrum, in a world of social media and Big Data, we can operate in a very different way: you can send me a very dull, cheap, advert and it has a much higher chance of altering my behaviour. Why? Because it is precisely the kind of thing that concerns the kind of person I am, in the situation I am in right now.

这就是为什么有些人对社交媒体公司收集和销售的数据感到担忧。如果数据足够多，人们不仅可以预测自己的行为，还可以控制自己的行为。这些数据揭示了人们在什么时候会被左右，以及需要做些什么才能做到这一点。随着时间的推移，这样的系统可以一点点地推动我，让我达到政治或行为领域的几乎任何一点。

This is the reason why some people are concerned about the data that social media companies are collecting, and selling. In sufficient quantities they allow a person not merely to predict, but to control our behaviour. They reveal the points at which you can be swayed one way or the other, and what it will take to do that. Over time, such systems can drip-feed enough nudges to take me to almost any point in political or behavioural space.

经验和资源

Experiences and resources

在人类发展（和教育）的背景下，这种类型对应两类活动：“经验”（产生新的关注点）和“资源”（回应您的关注点）。

In the context of human development (and education) this typology corresponds to two classes of activity: ‘experiences’ (which create new concerns), and ‘resources’ (which respond to your concerns).

例如，假设你发现你的伴侣（简）为你预订了攀登珠穆朗玛峰的旅行。光是知道你将要去攀登珠穆朗玛峰就会让你兴奋不已，充满期待。对这次经历的期待促使你在网上搜索建议和有用的信息——利用谷歌编目的资源。你会决定将其中一些信息牢记在心——因为你不想在半山腰上用谷歌搜索东西，一手拿着冰镐，一手紧咬牙关，戴着手套。

For example, let’s say you discover that your partner (Jane) has booked you on a trip to climb Everest. Just knowing that you will be doing it fills you with excitement and anticipation. The anticipation of the experience causes you to search the web for advice and useful information – drawing on the resources that Google has catalogued. Some of these you will take the decision to commit to memory – because you don’t want to be Googling stuff half way up the mountain, with an ice-axe in one hand and your glove gripped between your clenched teeth.

“体验”是您记得的事件，您的记忆（以及其他事物）塑造了您的行为。在设计体验时，我们希望产生持久的情感影响——这是一种“推动”干预，因为它会推动您朝着新的发展方向发展。

An ‘experience’ is an event that you remember, and your memories (among other things) shape your behaviour. In designing experiences, we look to have a lasting emotional impact – it’s a ‘push’ intervention, in that it pushes you in a new direction developmentally.

相比之下，资源是一种“拉动”干预——通常是一些相当简单和谦逊的东西，可以帮助您解决手头的任务，例如使用 Google 发现的一些建议。

By contrast, a resource is a ‘pull’ intervention – usually something quite simple and humble that helps you tackle the task at hand, for example some advice discovered using Google.

虽然一次成功的体验可能会改变你的行为方式，但改变你行为的最佳机会可能来自于了解你已经关心的事情并在你需要的时候提供资源。如果你想要显著改变一个组织的绩效，你会用资源而不是经验来做到这一点。

Whilst an experience, if successful, may change the way you behave, the best chance of altering your behaviour will probably come from understanding what you already care about and providing resources at the points when you need them. If you wanted to dramatically alter performance in an organization, you would do it with resources, not experiences.

想想 GPS。如果我能侵入 GPS 路线查找算法，我只需按一下键就能改变数百万人的驾驶习惯。这比昂贵的电视广告说服人们“尝试新的上班路线”要有效得多。

Think about GPS. If I could hack into the GPS route-finding algorithm I could change the driving habits of millions of people at a single keystroke. This would be much more effective than an expensive TV ad persuading people to ‘try a new route to work’.

当然，组织有许多标准操作程序，但问题是——没有人遵守它们！标准操作程序并不是组织可能想象的资源——指导工作场所的行为。人们的行为很大程度上取决于他们认为周围的人在特定情况下会如何反应。所以如果你花时间与组织中的人交谈，你就会发现，真正支配他们行为的是文化。

Now of course organizations have lots of standard operating procedures, but here’s the thing – no one is following them! Standard operating procedures are not the resources that organizations might imagine them to be – guiding workplace behaviour. People’s behaviour is largely determined by how they think the people around them will react in a given situation. So if you take the time to talk to people in organizations, you will learn that what really governs their behaviour is culture.

那么文化是由什么构成的呢？故事和感受——关于什么是正常的，什么是坏的，什么是好的——所有这些都体现了人们在特定情况下做他们应该做的事情的愿望。不让自己难堪。因此，与驾驶汽车不同，在社交环境中，您的 GPS 就是您周围人的面孔和反应。

And what is culture made up of? Stories and feelings – about what is normal, what is bad, what is good – all of which embody people’s desire to do what is expected of them in a given situation. To not embarrass themselves. So unlike driving a car, in a social context, your GPS is the faces and reactions of the people around you.

那些萦绕在我脑海中的感觉，让我成为了现在的我，让我成为了现在的我，让我做着现在的事情——这些感觉可能包括影响一代人的许多戏剧性事件（比如战争），也可能包括影响我个人的非常个人化的小事（比如“小黄瓜”评论）。有时它们只是一次又一次出现的东西（比如可口可乐）。

The sorts of feelings that stick in my head, and which make me the person I am, the person who does the things that I do – these feelings may range from the big dramatic ones that impact many people in a generation (like being at war) to the small very personal ones that impact me personally (like the ‘gherkin’ comment). Sometimes they are just the things that come up time and time again (like Coca-Cola).

将设计学习作为设计体验

Learning design as designed experience

在任何项目开始时，我们都需要明确我们想要实现的目标。至少，我们不应该陷入试图让人们记住信息的陷阱，仅仅因为“这就是教育的作用”。相反，我们应该着眼于我们试图实现的结果，并用可衡量的术语来定义这些结果。

At the outset of any project we need to be clear on what we are trying to accomplish. At a bare minimum we shouldn’t fall into the trap of attempting to get people to memorize information simply because ‘that’s what education does’. Instead, we should look at the outcomes we are trying to achieve and define these in measurable terms.

记住，结果可能不仅仅是绩效的转变，也可能是某人体验的转变，这一点非常重要。例如，我们可能希望人们感到更加投入、更具创新精神或更具包容性。我们可能希望他们更享受工作或更认同公司的使命。我们可能希望他们感到组织重视他们。

It’s really important to remember that an outcome might not simply be a shift in performance; it might be a shift in someone’s experience. For example, we might want people to feel more engaged, innovative or included. We might want them to enjoy their work more or to identify more closely with the company’s mission. We might want them to feel that the organization values them.

虽然这些听起来有些模糊，但它们可能会对绩效、士气和保留等方面产生非常实际的影响。

In case these sound a bit woolly, they can have a very real impact on things like performance, morale and retention.

再说一遍：如果我们想在绩效方面做出可衡量的改变，我们可以用两种方法之一来实现（不考虑雇佣不同的人）：我们可以减少学习的需要（通过绩效咨询），或者我们可以创造促进学习的环境（体验设计）。实际上只有两个选择。

Once more: if we are trying to make a measurable difference to performance, we can do it one of two ways (setting aside hiring different people): we can reduce the need to learn (through performance consulting), or we can create environments that promote learning (experience design). There really are only two options.

学习设计就是体验设计。在设计体验时，我们可以大手笔，也可以小手笔：例如，我们可以设计一场入职培训活动，让员工飞往佛罗里达与 CEO 会面（或制定新的激励计划），或者我们可以专注于对特定员工来说重要的小事——例如，确保员工的办公桌上有一张手写的个性化便条，并有了解他们的人随时准备迎接他们。

Learning design is experience design. In designing an experience we can go big or we can go small: for example, we can design an induction event where people are flown to Florida and get to meet the CEO (or put in place a new incentive scheme) or we can focus on the little things that matter to that particular person – for example, ensuring there is a hand-written, personalized note on their desk, and someone who knows about them ready to greet them.

你可能会想，为什么组织会把钱花在大型、有影响力的活动上，而他们可以通过关注小事来取得类似的效果，更小的体验——但答案是双重的：大型、有影响力的事件（如果经过精心设计）可以成为许多人的基石体验；其次，收集足够的信息并正确使用它们以在个人层面上实现相同的结果确实非常困难。

You might wonder why organizations spend money on big, impactful events when they might achieve similar results by focusing on the little, smaller, experiences – but the answer is twofold: the big, impactful events can (if carefully designed) be cornerstone experiences for many people, and second it’s really difficult to gather enough information and use it correctly to achieve the same result on a personal level.

最好的体验设计可能介于两者之间：也就是说，因为我们花时间对受众进行细分和了解，所以令人惊叹的体验能够引起参与者的共鸣。

The best experience designs probably sit somewhere in the middle: that is to say, amazing experiences that resonate with participants because we’ve taken the time to segment and understand that audience.

目前还没有人知道如何科学地进行体验设计。体验设计师很多，甚至有体验设计流派，但如果没有一个可以产生可测试预测的基础理论，这个领域仍然只能依靠直觉和反复试验。一个很好的比喻是桥梁建设：你不需要物理学来建造桥梁，但有些桥梁会因为你不理解的原因而倒塌，如果你真的不知道事物为什么会起作用，为什么不起作用，你就很难超越那些久经考验的模式。

Nobody yet knows how to do experience design scientifically. There are plenty of experience designers – even schools of experience design – but without an underlying theory from which to generate testable predictions, the field remains intuitive and trial and error in nature. A good analogy would be bridge building: you don’t need physics to build bridges – but some will fall down for reasons you don’t understand, and you will struggle to move beyond the tried and tested patterns if you don’t really know why things work and why they don’t.

情感语境模型提供了一个起点；下一步将是开发详细映射关注点的技术，并了解一个问题如何影响另一个问题。我认为总结一下我迄今为止发现的一些东西可能会有所帮助。

The affective context model provides a start; the next step will be to develop techniques for mapping concerns in detail, and understanding how one influences another. I thought it might be helpful to summarize some things I have found to date.

考虑里程碑或转变

Consider milestones or transitions

体验设计的最佳候选对象之一是过渡期——例如，当一个人加入组织、首次成为领导者或到达新地点时。过渡期是很好的候选对象，因为环境的变化标志着重新定义期望的机会。换句话说，你有机会创建新的规则、新的感受方式。

One of the best candidates for experience design are transitions – for example when a person joins an organization, when they become a leader for the first time, or when they arrive at a new location. Transitions are good candidates because a change in context marks an opportunity to redefine expectations. In other words, you have an opportunity to create new rules, new ways of feeling.

例如，想象一下，当一个人第一次到达迪士尼乐园时会发生什么。他们是要排几个小时的队才能通过旋转门，还是会有一个巫师叫出他们的名字来迎接他们？当一个人加入一个组织时，他们是否需要完成数小时的合规培训，还是首席执行官会和他们握手，回答他们的问题并提供建议？当一个人成为领导者时，我们会庆祝这一成就吗？如果我们庆祝的话，我们应该如何庆祝呢？

Consider – for example – what happens when a person first arrives at Disneyland. Do they queue for hours to pass through a turnstile, or are they greeted by a wizard who welcomes them by name? When someone joins an organization, will they be expected to complete hours of compliance training, or will the CEO shake them by the hand, answer their questions and offer advice? When a person becomes a leader, will we celebrate this achievement? If we do celebrate it, how should we celebrate it?

在新情况下，人们处于“流动”状态，我的意思是，他们对这种背景下存在的规范和期望保持警惕。由于这些规范和期望的制定方式（“锚定效应”），它们可能很难被理解。改变——这就是为什么从一开始就精心打造体验如此重要：上学的第一天，工作的第一天，第一次收到的交流，到达场地的第一次体验。

In a new situation, people are in a ‘fluid’ state, by which I mean they are alert to the norms and expectations that exist in this context. Because of the way these are laid down (the ‘anchoring effect’), they can be very hard to change later – which is why it’s so important to carefully craft an experience from the outset: the first day at school, the first day on the job, the first communication someone receives, the first experience on arriving at the venue.

有时，通过创建里程碑，可以创建目前不存在的明确过渡。里程碑是一种体验设计，例如毕业典礼或誓言，可以创造更大的意义感。

Sometimes it can help to create a clear transition where none currently exists – by creating milestones. Milestones are experience designs, such as graduation ceremonies or pledges, that create a greater sense of significance.

问一个问题‘人们会讲述什么故事？’

Ask the question ‘What story will people tell?’

有个故事：我当时正在为一家大型制药公司设计一个新的领导力项目。在早期阶段，人们不断将这个项目与他们之前实施的项目进行比较，并建议：“这个项目必须像以前一样好”。

Here’s a story: I was working on the design of a new leadership programme for a big pharmaceutical company. During the early stages, people kept comparing it to a programme that they had run before and suggesting: ‘It needs to be as good as that’.

我很好奇上一个项目有什么特别之处，但结果却是个失败品。该项目侧重于领导力的许多熟悉方面，在反馈和反思、设定期望等方面有很多很好的实践，但这并不是人们所记得的。

I wondered what it was about the previous programme that made it great. It turned out to be an egg. The programme focused on many familiar aspects of leadership, there was plenty of good practice around feedback and reflection, setting expectations, etc – but this was not what people remembered.

当我问她们这个节目最有标志性的是什么时，她们回答说是，她们脱光衣服，被邀请坐在一个巨大的塑料蛋里，测量她们的体重指数 (BMI)。她们记得的就是这个。

When I asked them about the thing that made the programme iconic, it was the point where, stripped to their undies, they were invited to sit inside a giant plastic egg that measured their body mass index (BMI). This is what they remembered.

这有多么奇怪，值得思考。你很难说这是对他们的表现影响最大的节目部分——其他背景元素可能发挥了重要作用——但这是他们讲述的故事，如果没有这个故事，整个活动很有可能会从记忆中消失。

It’s worth thinking about how weird that is. You would be hard-pressed to argue that this is the part of the programme that had the greatest impact on their performance – other contextual elements may have done the heavy lifting – but this is the story that they told, and without it there is a good chance the whole event would have vanished from memory.

您可能已经猜到了，我们希望避免我们的故事“毫无意义”——一旦我们明白故事具有感染力，我们就会有意地将其与关键的行为改变联系起来。（在所讨论的案例中，BMI 的测量是节目中讨论领导者适应力、精力和健康状况的一部分。因此，它不会被视为毫无意义的。）

As you have probably guessed, we want to avoid our stories being ‘gratuitous’ – once we understand that it is the story that sticks, we want to link it to critical behaviour change in a deliberate fashion. (In the case in question, the measuring of BMI was situated within a portion of the programme that talked about leader resilience, energy and health. It wasn’t perceived as gratuitous, therefore.)

话虽如此，这是挑战大量传统学习设计的最简单方法：“人们会讲什么故事？”如果你不能就故事是什么达成一致，那么你很可能是在浪费时间。把故事放在体验设计的核心位置。

That said, this is the easiest way to challenge a great deal of conventional learning design: ‘What’s the story people will tell?’ If you can’t agree what it is, chances are you are wasting your time. Put the story at the heart of your experience design.

它应该处于可接受的边缘

It should feel on the edge of acceptability

“定义”阶段表明，领导者希望能够更好地处理冲突，但“发现”阶段表明，领导者往往是工程师，而且通常性格内向，不善于发现冲突，也不喜欢对抗。所以我们开始争吵。

The ‘define’ stage had surfaced a desire for leaders to be better at handling conflict, but the ‘discover’ stage had revealed that leaders tended to be engineers and typically introverts who were poor at spotting conflict and uncomfortable with confrontation. So we started a fight.

参与者来到领导力培训课程现场，一开始就出现了问题：两位主持人合不来，很快他们就为幻灯片混在一起的责任而争吵起来。几分钟后，事情升级到一方推倒另一方的地步。

Participants showed up for the leadership training session, and right from the outset something wasn’t right: the two facilitators didn’t get on, pretty soon they were bickering over who was responsible for getting the slides mixed up. A few minutes in, things escalated to the point where one pushed the other over.

然后我们停止表演。我们介绍了两位演员，然后邀请人们谈论他们看到了什么，他们应该在什么时候干预，为什么他们不愿意这样做，等等。然后我们再次进行整个过程——论坛剧场风格——让人们有机会进行干预。

Then we stopped the action. We introduced our two actors, then invited people to talk about what they had seen, when they should have intervened, why they were uncomfortable doing so, etc. Then we ran the whole thing again – forum theatre style – and gave people a shot at intervening.

良好的体验设计需要与众不同。它需要打破常规；它需要让我们感到惊讶并超出预期。如果我们想学习，就必须这样做，因为我们的记忆会选择性地关注那些不符合我们心理模型（我们的“图式”）的事物。

A good experience design needs to be out of the ordinary. It needs to break the pattern; it needs to surprise us and defy expectations. We have to do this if we want learning to take place, because our memories selectively attend to those things that don’t fit with our mental model (our ‘schema’).

想象一下，你去一家餐厅，服务员无缘无故地跳了一段奇怪的舞。你能记得多少服务员？你一定记得那一个！（我确实记得华沙的一家墨西哥餐厅，当有人过生日时，一个扮成佐罗的人送来了一个插着蜡烛的生日蛋糕）。

Imagine you go to a restaurant and – for no particular reason – the waiter does an odd dance. How many waiters can you remember? You would remember that one! (I actually do remember a Mexican restaurant in Warsaw where when it was someone’s birthday a figure dressed as Zorro delivered a birthday cake with candles).

但有一个问题——偏离剧本恰恰是让我们感到焦虑的事情。你可能甚至一想到服务员在你的餐桌上跳舞，内心就会感到畏缩。这对有效的体验设计提出了非常现实的挑战。

But there is a problem – departing from the script it precisely the sort of thing that makes us anxious. You probably cringed inwardly even at the thought of having a waiter do a dance at your table. This creates a very real challenge for effective experience design.

许多利益相关者对于任何偏离标准教育模式的事情都会感到不安。许多人会认为学习计划应该让人们静静地坐着听老师讲课。矛盾的是，做一些偏离剧本的事情会让利益相关者感到不安，原因恰恰与这样做会使它有效的原因相同。

Many of your stakeholders will feel uneasy about doing anything that departs from the standard educational schema. Many will assume that a learning programme should entail people sitting quietly listening to an instructor talk. Paradoxically, doing something that departs from the script will make stakeholders uneasy for precisely the same reason that it will make it effective.

因此，体验设计永远是一场战斗——一场赢得利益相关者信任的战斗，一场为打破传统而战的战斗。最有效的方法之一就是进行试点和实验。利益相关者可能会对你的建议感到震惊，但如果你能向他们保证，你会先小规模地尝试和测试，他们可能会让你做一些不同的事情。

So experience design is always a battle – a battle to win the trust of your stakeholders, and fight for the space to do something that breaks with tradition. One of the most effective ways to do this is to pilot and experiment. Stakeholders will be horrified at your suggestions, but if you can reassure them that you are going to try things on a small scale and test first, they might let you do something a little different.

从经验上看，最佳点是可接受的边缘；向人扔棉花糖有点奇怪，但如果我（像 DJ Steve Aoki 一样）将一个大冰蛋糕扔到我前排商业观众震惊的脸上，这可能就太过分了。

From experience, the sweet spot is the edge of acceptability; throwing marshmallows at people is a little weird, but were I (like the DJ Steve Aoki) to fling a large iced cake into the shocked faces of my front row business audience, this would probably be taking it too far.

在一次体验设计中，我们（无聊地）向高管听众讲述了了解客户的重要性，并在此过程中根据社交媒体资料介绍了一些客户角色。然后，我们（出乎意料地）把真正的客户带进房间，让一小群高管与他们坐在一起，谈论他们的生活。（“真正的”客户实际上是演员，我们向他们介绍了公司的市场数据，并为他们创建了虚构的社交媒体账户。）

In one experience design we talked (boringly) about the importance of getting to know your customers to an executive audience, introducing some customer personas along the way, based on social media profiles. We then (unexpectedly) marched the real customers into the room and had small groups of executives sit with them and talk about their lives. (The ‘real’ customers were actually actors briefed against the company’s market data, and for whom we created fictitious social media accounts.)

他们表示，这次经历令人难忘。他们还发现，他们不知道如何将新产品推销给真正的客户。

They said it was incredibly memorable. They also discovered that they didn’t know how to sell their new products to real customers.

感觉应该真实

It should feel real

几年前，我曾负责改善英国石油公司的安全培训。我有幸与一位名叫吉姆·韦瑟比的家伙共事，他是唯一一位指挥过五次太空飞行任务的美国人。查一下他，他在维基百科上的条目令人震惊。

Years ago I worked at improving safety training at BP. I had the privilege of working with a chap called Jim Wetherbee – the only American to have commanded five spaceflight missions. Look him up, his Wikipedia entry is staggering.

在一位名叫 Urbain Bruyere 的朋友的带领下，他和我飞去会见另一位令人印象深刻的家伙——Jonah Lehrer（《我们如何决定》一书的作者），讨论有关大脑的最新想法以及这些知识如何帮助英国石油公司变得更安全。我记得 Jim 说过一句话：“当你汗流浃背时，你就知道模拟器正在工作。”这句话非常有趣：体验的学习效果首先是可以感受到的。这意味着，当我们设计一种体验时，如果你希望学习具有可转移性，它需要在重要方面让人感觉像真实的一样。

Under the leadership of a friend called Urbain Bruyere, he and I flew out to meet with another impressive chap – Jonah Lehrer (author of How We Decide) – to talk about the latest thinking on brains and how that knowledge might help make BP a safer place. One thing I remember Jim saying is: ‘You know a simulator is working when it makes you sweat’. It’s such an interesting remark: the learning effect of an experience is felt, first and foremost. It means that when we design an experience, if you want the learning to be transferrable, it needs to feel like the real thing in significant respects.

如何让体验感觉像真实的一样？首先，你需要能够描绘出某样事物给人的感觉。这就是逼真性的含义——如果模拟的感觉与真实事物相同，那么它就是好的模拟。

How do you make an experience feel like the real thing? Well, for one thing you need to be able to map how something makes people feel. This is what verisimilitude in this context means – a simulation is a good simulation if it feels the same as the real thing.

这就是我一直对“领导力模拟器”持怀疑态度的原因之一。在模拟器中，人们点击屏幕，显示一系列与团队成员相关的分支场景。真正的领导力不是那样的感觉。真正的战争不像下棋。领导力是坐在办公桌对面，看着某人泪流满面，而你试图对他们被欺负的感受做出适当的反应。

This is one of the reasons why I have consistently been sceptical of ‘leadership simulators’ in which people click through screens displaying a series of branching scenarios relating to team members. Real leadership doesn’t feel like that. Real warfare doesn’t feel like chess. Leadership is sitting across a desk from someone in tears as you try to react appropriately to their feelings of being bullied.

你可能认为重现这种体验非常困难，但因为很多领导力主要都是本能的（就像养育孩子一样），所以这并不像你想象的那么难。一个人可能知道他们正在和演员一起进行角色扮演，但当演员泪流满面，或者与他们面对面大喊大叫时，你会看到他们的身体反应就像他们在现实中一样；他们的脉搏加速，他们的思维被肾上腺素搞得混乱，他们的情绪和反应就像这不是模拟的一样。

You might think that it’s very hard to recreate this experience, but because a lot of leadership is primarily visceral (in the same way that parenting is), it’s not as hard as you think. A person might know that they are role-playing with an actor, but have the actor break down into tears, or stand toe to toe with them yelling abuse and you will see them physically react as they would for real; their pulse races, their thinking is muddled by adrenaline, they mirror emotions and respond as they would were this not a simulation.

在创造体验时，我们应该考虑将人们置于与传统教育环境不同的环境中——要么将人们带离环境，要么以不同的方式利用环境。这并不是为了让人们度过一段“快乐的时光”，而是为了创造更令人难忘的学习体验，或者更好地转移到绩效环境中的学习体验。同样，当你将人们置于陌生的环境中时（出于上述原因），他们更有可能尝试以前没有尝试过的事情。新环境令人解放。

In creating experiences, we should consider putting people in environments that don’t resemble conventional educational ones – either by taking people out of them, or using them differently. This is not so people can have a ‘fun time’, it’s either so we can create learning experiences that are more memorable, or those that transfer better to the performance context. It is also true that when you place people in an unfamiliar context (for the reasons above), they are more likely to try something they haven’t tried before. A new environment is liberating.

创造未知领域

Create uncharted territory

你打过架吗？不是网上争吵，而是真实的、西式拳击？如果你没有打过架，你会转身逃跑还是坚守阵地？你是胆小鬼还是斗士？

Have you ever been in a fight? Not an online argument but a real, spaghetti-Western fist fight? If you haven’t then would you turn and run or would you stand your ground? Are you a coward or a scrapper?

如果你曾经打过架，那么你就会知道自己属于哪一种人。如果你没有打过架，那你就不知道。你知道自己想成为哪一种人，但你还没有确定。如果你发现自己处于这种情况，你会在离开时明确知道自己是什么样的人，这可能会永远改变你对自己的看法。

If you have been in a fight, then you know which of these you are. If you haven’t, you don’t. You know which one you would like to be, but you are as yet undefined. Were you to find yourself in this situation, you would exit it knowing definitively what kind of person you are, and it would likely change the way you see yourself forever.

我想说的是：人们在很大程度上是由他们在某些情况下做出的决定来定义的，在这种情况下他们不能简单地“随大流”——例如，在新的环境中，他们不能复制过去的经验或使用社会参照作为指导。在那些时刻，他们会做出决定，并展现出自己的本性。

The point I am making is this: people are defined to a large extent by the decisions they take in certain situations where they cannot simply ‘follow the crowd’ – for example, new situations where they cannot copy past experience or use social referencing as a guide. In those moments they make a decision and reveal themselves as they are.

我们可以（小心地）创造这些未知的情况，让人们安全地体验它们，审查他们所做的决定，并且 - 如果有必要 - 通过再次运行它们来重新定义自己。

We can (carefully) create these kinds of uncharted situations, allow people to experience them safely, to review the decisions they took and – if necessary – redefine themselves by running them again.

一个典型的例子可能是斯坦利·米尔格拉姆的服从实验。他创造了一种情境，实验者说服人们对另一个人施加致命的电击（模仿二战期间纳粹军官的行为）。至少，人们以为自己杀了另一个人——事实上，这个人是个傀儡，整个设置都是为了测试人们在压力之下会变得多么服从。

A classic example of this might be Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments. He created a situation in which an experimenter convinced people to administer fatal electric shocks to another person (mirroring the behaviour of Nazi officers during the Second World War). At least, people thought they had killed another person – in fact the individual was a stooge, the whole set-up designed to test how obedient people would be under pressure.

你们中的许多人可能都熟悉他的作品，但我在这里想表达的观点有所不同。人们回顾过去会（正确地）得出结论，他们比以前认为的要听话得多。我们未知的领域会重新定义他们。

Many of you will be familiar with his work, but the point I want to make here is different. People watching themselves back would (rightly) conclude that they were far more obedient than they had previously believed. Our uncharted territory would have redefined them.

但如果我们允许他们重新进行实验（或类似情况）会怎么样呢？事实上，我们确实这样做了，而且这种体验有效地让人们意识到在类似情况下做出类似行为的危险——他们更有可能反对。

But what if we allowed them to re-run the experiment (or a similar situation)? In fact, this was done and the experience effectively inoculated people against the dangers of behaving similarly in comparable situations – they were more likely to object.

在设计体验时，我们希望创造一种情境，让人们面临挑战，不能简单地做其他人会做的事情，而必须自己做决定。但俗话说，能力越大，责任越大：我们必须非常小心地定义这些体验，以免伤害到人们。

In designing experiences, we look to create situations where people are challenged and cannot simply do what everyone else would do, but have to decide for themselves. But – as the saying goes – with great power comes great responsibility: we have to be very careful in the way we define these experiences so as not to damage people.

想象一下创造一种体验（可能像津巴多的斯坦福监狱模拟），一个人可以决定成为一个虐待狂或种族主义者（一些多元化培训接近这一点，可能会让人们感到受伤或“被贴上标签”）。如果一个人被揭露是这样的，那会有什么影响？你会如何谨慎处理？

Imagine creating an experience (perhaps like Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison simulation) in which a person can decide to be a sadist, or a racist (some diversity training approaches this, and can leave people feeling bruised or ‘labelled’). If a person has been revealed as such, what impact might that have? How would you handle that carefully?

在学习行业，人们有理由担心创造的强大体验会伤害人们而不是帮助他们成长。这就是为什么了解受众并仔细测试体验设计很重要。但我们必须接受这一挑战。没有过山车，主题公园就什么都不是，但每辆过山车都经过精心校准，以提供高水平的刺激而不会伤害乘客。

In the learning industry there is justified anxiety regarding creating powerful experiences that damage people rather than helping them grow. This is why it’s important to understand one’s audience, and to carefully test experience designs. But we must accept this challenge. Theme parks would be nothing without rollercoasters, but every rollercoaster is carefully calibrated to provide high levels of excitement without damaging its passengers.

了解人们关心的是什么

Understand what matters to people

无论你设计的是大型体验（比如一次活动）还是小型体验（比如一条反馈），了解其影响的关键在于它对人们的感动程度。

Whether you are designing a big experience (such as an event) or a small one (such as a piece of feedback), the key to understanding the impact it will have is the extent to which it moves people.

但你怎么知道呢？你可以选择两种方式之一——你可以做一些本质上能打动绝大多数人的事情，或者做一些能引起特定个人共鸣的事情。这两种方法都依赖于解决某人的核心问题——在前一种情况下，你瞄准的是人类自然共有的一些核心问题，在后一种情况下，你瞄准的是个人特有的核心问题。

But how do you know that? You can go one of two ways – you can do something that by its very nature moves the vast majority of people, or you can do something that resonates with a particular individual. Both approaches depend on addressing someone’s core concerns – in the former case you are aiming at some of the core concerns that human beings naturally share, in the latter you are aiming at a core concern specific to the individual.

举个例子：想象一下，你召集领导团队，而不是像往常一样进行 PowerPoint 演示，而是前总统巴拉克·奥巴马登上舞台。每个人都会记住这件事，每个人都会谈论这件事。我怎么知道的？嗯——无论你是否是总统的粉丝，名人都是人类深切关注的问题。名人是高地位的个体，而人类是等级分明的生物。

Let me give you an example: imagine that you gather your leadership team together and, instead of the usual battery of PowerPoint presentations, former president Barack Obama takes the stage. Everybody will remember this, everybody will talk about this. How do I know that? Well – whether you are a fan of the president or not, celebrity is a deeply human concern. Celebrities are high-status individuals and humans are hierarchical creatures.

一个更廉价的噱头可能是我在自己的演讲中经常使用的：我出其不意地向人们扔大棉花糖。每个人都记得这个——我鼓励他们思考为什么会这样。答案是，人类记忆会选择性地编码我们对其作出反应的东西——而我们对令人惊讶或奇怪的行为作出反应。

A cheaper stunt might be the one I routinely pull at my own talks: I unexpectedly throw giant marshmallows at people. Everybody remembers that – and I encourage them to think about why that is. The answer is that human memory selectively encodes stuff we react to – and we react to surprising or peculiar behaviour.

但有时这种蛮力方法可能无法达到我们想要的结果；例如，当我们希望父母或领导者意识到他们可以做得更好时，获​​得顿悟。这时，一条评论可能就起到了变革性体验的作用。

But there may be times when this brute force approach is not going to achieve the result we are looking for; for example where we want a parent or a leader to realize that they could do better – to achieve a moment of insight. Here, it might be a single comment that acts as a transformative experience.

这些时刻更难设计，因为我们需要对个人有很深入的了解。我们需要了解他们的核心关切，才能带来改变。例如，假设某人非常关心公平——但他们的一些行为却招致了偏袒的指责。你可能会认为这种批评性反馈会直击他们的内心——但除非它来自他们非常尊重的人，否则他们很有可能会忽视它。

These moments are harder to design, because we need to know a lot about the individual. We need to understand their core concerns in order to bring about change. For example, let’s say someone cares deeply about fairness – but some of their behaviours are giving rise to accusations of favouritism. You might think that this critical feedback would strike them to the core – but unless it comes from someone they deeply respect, there is every chance they will dismiss it.

海德的平衡理论可以在这里提供帮助：如果我们想改变对自己的态度，我们既需要令人信服的证据，也需要我们深深依恋的人，这样我们就不会简单地忽视反馈或人。

Heider’s balance theory can help here: if we want to change an attitude towards oneself we need both the compelling evidence and someone that we are so deeply attached to that we can’t simply dismiss either the feedback or the person.

思考个性化体验设计力量的另一种方式是“参与其中”的概念，这个表达用来描述个人对某事的个人投资程度。例如，在历史上的某个时期，罗马桥梁建造者被要求在他们建造的建筑物下居住一段时间——这就是参与其中！

Another way to think about the power of personalized experience design is the concept of ‘skin in the game’, an expression used to describe the extent to which an individual in personally invested in something. For example, at one point in history Roman bridge builders were required to live beneath the structures they built for a period of time – that’s skin in the game!

在日常生活中，我们经常会遇到这种情况，例如当有人在同学或同事面前站起来演讲，或者在观众面前进行某种竞争活动时。这里涉及的不是他们的生命，而是相当接近的东西：他们的自尊。在这种情况下，人们对自己的成功、失败和屈辱有着深刻的记忆。

In an everyday setting we encounter this, for example when someone gets up in front of their classmates or colleagues to speak, or when they engage in some kind of competitive activity in front of an audience. It is not their life that is at stake here, but something pretty close: their pride. People have powerful memories for their successes, defeats and humiliations in these kinds of situations.

设计体验的一种常见方法是利用我们知道人们关心的受众——他们的高层领导、同事、父母——来创造一个高风险的情境。人们会非常努力地在这些情境中实现最佳表现，而结果可能会产生持久的影响。

A common way to design an experience is to use an audience that we know people care about – their senior leaders, their peers, their parents – to create a high-stakes situation. People will work really hard to achieve peak performance in these contexts, and the outcome can have lasting impact.

创造挑战

Create challenges

根据经验法则，挑战推动学习。如果我查看学习计划设计，没有发现明显的挑战，那么很可能学习没有进行。为什么？

As a rule of thumb, challenges drive learning. If I am looking through a learning programme design and there are no obvious challenges – then the chances are no learning is going on. Why?

回答这个问题最简单的方法是参考学习理论家 Jean Piaget 的观点。Jean 注意到，人们在学习中趋向于“平衡”点，即他们内心的世界心理模型与外部世界相匹配的点，此时事情会按预期进行（我们往往会停止学习）。

The simplest way to answer this question is by reference to Jean Piaget, the learning theorist. Jean noticed that people tend to a point of ‘equilibrium’ in their learning – a point where their internal mental model of the world matches the outside world, and at that point things go as expected (and we tend to stop learning).

这很有道理：学习是一种旨在帮助我们生存的稳态机制。一旦我们弄清楚了世界是如何运转的——如何实现最佳条件——我们就会停止学习，因为学习是昂贵的。

This makes a lot of sense: learning is a homeostatic mechanism designed to help us survive. Once we have figured out how the world works – how to achieve optimum conditions – we stop learning, since learning is costly.

重新激发我们学习热情的是“不平衡”：当世界让我们感到惊讶时，当事情不符合我们的预期时，当现实像一个浑身沾满油漆的小孩一样令人震惊地出现在我们精心布置的精神客厅中时。

What re-ignites our learning is ‘dis-equilibrium’: moments when the world surprises us, when things don’t meet our expectations, when reality emerges shockingly into our carefully arranged mental living room like a small child covered in paint.

让人感到惊讶的方式无穷无尽，但如果我们希望人们发展新的能力而不是仅仅记住一些东西，那么我们就需要将他们置于具有挑战性的情境中，将学习转移到其他情境中。

There are infinite ways to be surprising, but if we want people to develop new capabilities and not merely remember something, then we will need to put them in challenging situations where the learning transfers to other contexts.

根据我的经验，当我们应该做另一件事时却做另一件事，这往往会给体验设计带来坏名声：在某种程度上，人们意识到“滑稽的动作”（例如击鼓、建造木筏、马语、原始尖叫）会带来难忘的体验，但企业正确地怀疑其对绩效的影响。

It’s my experience that doing one thing when we should be doing the other has often given experience design a bad name: at some level people realize that ‘zany antics’ (e.g. drumming, raft-building, horse-whispering, primal screaming) make for memorable experiences, but businesses became rightly sceptical about the impact on performance.

在电影《死亡 诗社》中，特立独行的英语老师约翰·基廷（由罗宾·威廉姆斯饰演）向困惑的学生介绍了一系列改变人生的经历，这让他那些传统的教育同事感到震惊，最终他被解雇了。这是一个关于体验设计与教育、进步与传统、差异与顺从的故事。

In the movie Dead Poets Society, maverick English teacher John Keating – played by Robin Williams – introduces his bewildered students to a succession of life-changing experiences, to the horror of his traditionalist educational colleagues, who eventually manage to get him fired. It’s a tale about experience design versus education, progress versus tradition, and difference versus conformity.

在我们拥有经过验证的映射关注点的技术之前，我们最安全的领域是那些与现实问题有明显关系的挑战。

Until we have proven techniques for mapping concerns, our safest territory is challenges that bear some obvious relation to real ones.

请注意，这里的“挑战性”具有特定的技术意义：只有当您的思维模型目前未将体验纳入其中时，体验才具有挑战性。我想对很多人来说，这个想法——学习体验应该在某种程度上具有挑战性——似乎是显而易见的。

Note that ‘challenging’ has a specific technical sense here: an experience is only challenging if your mental model doesn’t currently incorporate it. I guess to many people this idea – that learning experiences should be challenging in some way – might seem obvious.

那么，教育中挑战性这么小，难道不奇怪吗？我们怎么会轻易接受设计一个“学习”计划，让大部分时间都花在坐着听讲上呢？

Isn’t it odd, then, how little of education is challenging? How readily we accept that it’s OK to design a ‘learning’ programme where the vast majority of time is spent sitting, listening?

我确实看到过一些带有象征性挑战的课程——例如讨论人们刚刚听到的内容。这些通常只占课程时间的 20% 以下，课程的 80% 时间都用于教学。学习设计师沉迷于内容。

I do see programmes with tokenistic challenges – for example a discussion about what people have just heard. Oftentimes these comprise less than 20 per cent of the time, with 80 per cent of the programme given over to instruction. Learning designers are addicted to content.

翻转模型！您将如何设计一个 80% 的时间都是挑战的课程？更好的是 - 完全基于挑战？实际上，这是设计学习课程的一个很好的起点：“我们如何让这个课程完全基于挑战？”

Flip the model! How would you design a programme where 80 per cent of the time is challenges? Better still – where it is entirely challenge-based? This is, in practice, a great starting point for the design of a learning programme: ‘How do we make this programme entirely challenge-based?’

这就是我们为德勤设计的屡获殊荣的入职培训计划——为期五天、以挑战为基础的学习计划。而且因为这是 2021 年，所以整个过程必须是数字化的！简而言之：将内容转化为资源，让体验充满挑战。

This was how we designed the award-winning induction programme for Deloitte – a five-day, challenge-based learning programme. And because this was 2021, the whole thing had to be digital! In short: turn the content into resources, make the experience challenging.

我让设计挑战性体验的过程变得比实际更简单。你有没有注意到一个隐藏的问题：我们如何确定对于特定个体来说什么是挑战？

I’ve made the process of designing challenging experiences simpler than it actually is. Did you notice the hidden question: how do we figure out what is challenging for a given individual?

问题在于，人们对同一挑战的反应各不相同（与我们的情感背景模型一致）。例如，有些人可能会因挑战失败而彻底崩溃，并决心不再尝试，而另一些人则可能渴望再试一次。在另一个极端，有些人可能根本不把它当回事，因此从中什么也没学到。

The problem is that people react differently to the same challenge (consistent with our affective context model). Some people – for example – might be utterly crushed by failing at a challenge and resolve never to try again, whilst others might be itching to give it another shot. At the other extreme, some people might not take it seriously at all, and consequently learn nothing from it.

一个简单的例子就是公开演讲：一个相当标准的学习项目体验设计是让参与者在最后在同学面前发表演讲。这种挑战确实可以推动学习，因为人们通常关心同学的想法。我们可以与家长和上级一起加强它——通过《龙穴》或法庭戏剧让其更加紧张。

A simple example is public speaking: a pretty standard experience design for a learning programme has participants giving a speech in front of their peers at the end. This challenge can really drive learning, since people generally care what their peers think. We can ramp it up with parents and superiors – make it more intense with Dragons’ Den or courtroom theatrics.

但请稍等一下：有些人害怕公开演讲，而另一些人则喜欢这个机会。我们必须小心照顾人们。例如，我们必须考虑支持人们的方法，并灵活调整形式，使人们能够适当调整挑战的强度。例如，也许一个人是进行演讲的团队的一员，并且可以控制他们的参与程度。

But hold on a second: some people are terrified of public speaking, whilst others relish the opportunity. We have to be careful to take care of people. We have to consider, for example, ways to support people and flex the format to enable people to calibrate the intensity of the challenge appropriately. For example, perhaps a person is part of a group giving the presentation and can control their level of participation.

关于创造挑战，最后但非常重要的一点是：您可能不想使用“快乐表”（培训计划的标准 Likert 1-5 1 级和 2 级评估）来评估您的经历。

One last but very important thing to say about creating challenges: you probably don’t want to use ‘happy sheets’ (the standard Likert 1–5 level 1 and 2 evaluation for training programmes) to evaluate your experiences.

直白地说，如果某件事是有效的学习体验，人们可能不会从中获得很多乐趣；相反，他们应该感到有挑战性。因此，评估你的项目是否成功的更好方法（除了实际的行为改变）是问这个问题：“你觉得这个体验有多具挑战性？”

Put bluntly, if something is an effective learning experience, people may not be having a lot of fun; instead they should feel challenged. So a better way to evaluate the success of your programme (aside from the actual behaviour change) would be the question: ‘How challenging did you find the experience?’

令人感到羞耻的是，教育行业竟然将快乐表（本质上是衡量人们享受培训体验的程度的指标）作为我们工作的衡量标准。第一级评估使我们沦为二流娱乐，而第二级评估则给我们带来了额外的压力，让我们同时表现得像学校老师。在从教育转向学习的过程中，我们需要放弃这一切。

It is a source of immense shame that the learning industry descended into using happy sheets – essentially a measure of how much people enjoyed a training experience – as a measure of our work. Level 1 evaluation has relegated us to the role of second-rate entertainment, whilst level 2 has lumbered us with the additional pressure to behave like schoolteachers at the same time. In moving from education to learning, we need to let go of all this.

测试和迭代

Test and iterate

体验设计还不是一门科学；我们还没有认知或学习的科学，只有一种理论。体验设计在很大程度上仍然是直觉和反复试验的结合。

Experience design is not yet a science; we don’t yet have a science of cognition or learning, just a theory. Experience design to a large extent is still a combination of intuition and trial and error.

这意味着——就像我们的桥梁建造者一样——最好的前进方式是敢于梦想，从小规模开始试验，并尝试各种方法。我认为我还没有遇到过一种体验设计能像我们想象的那样奏效。我也为不同的受众——无论是跨文化的还是同一文化的——提供了效果截然不同的体验。

This means that – like our bridge builders – the best way to proceed is to dream big, experiment on a small scale, and try a variety of approaches. I don’t think I have come across a single experience design that has worked quite as we imagined it would. I have also run experiences that worked quite differently with different audiences – both across cultures, and within a culture.

实现预期学习结果的最佳方法是提出几个（比如说三个）候选体验设计，获得批准进行测试，然后将最成功的一个扩大到试点，并在过程中重新设计。这种“测试和迭代”方法是您获得强大体验的最佳机会。如果您让受众参与共同设计，效果会最好，因为他们的反应是成功的关键。

The best way to address a desired learning outcome is to come up with a handful (say, three) candidate experience designs, get approval to test them, and scale up the most successful one to a pilot, redesigning as you go. This ‘test and iterate’ approach is your best chance of arriving at a powerful experience. It will work best if you involve your audience in co-designing it, since it is their reactions that are central to success.

我发现另一种有用的方法是观察其他环境中具有重大影响的经历，并试图找出是什么让它们如此令人难忘：例如，一次特别令人难忘的晚宴或婚礼。

Another approach that I have found useful is to look at experiences in other environments that have a big impact, and try to figure out what it is that makes them so memorable: for example, an especially memorable dinner party or a wedding.

体验设计的过程

The process of experience design

总而言之，我建议您在设计体验时遵循以下顺序：

In summary, there is a sequence I would recommend you follow in designing an experience, which goes something like this:

• 使用“思考/感受/行动”模型定义您想要的结果。我们可能希望人们在特定任务上表现更好，或者我们可能希望人们觉得他们加入某个组织的决定是正确的。两者都能带来可衡量的商业利益。

• Define the outcomes you are looking for using the ‘think/feel/do’ model. We may want people to be better at a specific task, or we may want people to feel that they made the right decision in joining an organization. Both deliver measurable business benefit.

• 发现你的受众关心什么。你需要知道他们真正关心什么，以此作为设计的基础。谁是他们的英雄？他们为什么来上班？他们最自豪的是什么？过去塑造他们的经历是什么？

• Discover what matters to your audience. You’ll need to know what they really care about as a basis for your design. Who are their heroes? Why do they come to work? What are they most proud of? What are the experiences that shaped them in the past?

• 设计一些突破可接受性极限并打破常规的实验。这些通常是人们以前从未经历过的挑战。问问自己：“人们会讲述什么故事？”并积极设计机会将体验分享到这种形式中（例如使用社交媒体）。

• Design a number of experiments that push the limits of acceptability and depart from the norm. These will typically be challenges of the kind that people haven’t experienced before. Ask yourself: ‘What story will people tell?’ and actively design opportunities to share the experience (e.g. using social media) into the format.

• 反复开发这些想法，与目标受众中的小组一起进行实验，以了解它们的影响。不要害怕抛弃不起作用的东西。

• Develop these ideas iteratively, running experiments with small groups from your target audience to understand the impact they have. Don’t be afraid to dump stuff that isn’t working.

• 以 MVE（最小可行体验）的形式试行最佳想法。根据试行的反馈和观察继续开发您的设计。

• Pilot the best idea(s) in the form of an MVE (minimum viable experience). Continue to develop your design based on feedback and observation of the pilot.

• 以允许一定灵活性的方式大规模部署体验——例如针对不同的文化或不同的个人。“盒装体验”是实现此目的的一种方式：一种体验工具包，地方可以根据其文化进行调整。

• Deploy the experience at scale in a way that allows for some flexibility – for example for different cultures, or different individuals. The ‘experience in a box’ is one way of doing this: an experience toolkit that local regions can adapt to fit their culture.

• 根据您的评估进行迭代：考虑使用诸如“这次体验有多难？”之类的问题，而不是常规问题，并寻找业务影响的衡量标准。通过鼓励人们分享您的体验来扩大其影响。

• Iterate in line with your evaluation: consider using questions such as: ‘How challenging was this experience?’ instead of the conventional ones, and look for measures of business impact. Amplify the effect of your experiences by encouraging people to share them.

您可能想知道为什么我在学习设计讨论中没有提到教学设计。这是因为，用《 银河系漫游指南》的话来说，教学设计充其量是“基本无害的”。

You might be wondering why I have not mentioned instructional design in my discussion of learning design. That’s because, in the words of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, instructional design is at best ‘Mostly Harmless’.

绝大多数教学设计（例如认知负荷理论²）涉及狭窄范围的教育应用，通常回忆事实信息，并且不会对您的学习设计提供重大帮助。

The vast majority of instructional design – for example cognitive load theory² – relates to a narrow range of educational applications, typically recall of factual information, and won’t help you significantly with learning design.

换句话说，如果你想让某人简短地记住一些事实，以便他们能够通过回忆测试（教育），那么一定要看看教学设计。它会告诉你如何将方形钉子钉入圆孔，即完全忽略塑造学习者和学习过程的关注点，而是专注于强制灌输内容的技术。

In other words, if what you are trying to do is get someone to briefly memorize some facts so that they can pass a recall test (education), then by all means take a look at instructional design. It will tell you how to hammer a square peg into a round hole, i.e. completely disregard the concerns that shape the learner and learning process and instead focus on techniques to force-feed content regardless.

但如果你对学习感兴趣，就应该把它放在一边。它只会误导你。学习专业人士对教学设计感兴趣就像医生对顺势疗法感兴趣一样；它不会有帮助，但可能会分散你的注意力，甚至破坏你的健康。

But if you are interested in learning you should set it aside. It will only mislead you. A learning professional taking an interest in instructional design is like a doctor taking an interest in homeopathy; it won’t help, but it may distract and even undermine you.

如果我们不再仅仅思考刻意的体验设计，而是去思考我们在日常生活中无意中设计的那种无意识的体验，那么就有一些重要的考虑因素——这些考虑因素可能会让你停下来反思你的生活。

If we move beyond thinking about experience design in the deliberate sense, to the kind of unintentional experiences we inadvertently design in everyday life, there are some important considerations – considerations that might cause you to stop and reflect on your life.

很多事情都会缩短你的寿命：酗酒、吸毒、肥胖和吸烟。但迄今为止，伤害最大的是——例行公事。我并不是说例行公事会损害你的身体（尽管它可能确实会损害你的身体）；想象一下，如果你的生活如此例行公事，以至于每一天都几乎一模一样。结果，在你生命的尽头，你只能活一天。

There are many things that can shorten your life: drink, drugs, obesity and cigarettes. But the one which will do the most damage by far is – routine. I don’t mean that routine will damage your body (although it probably does); imagine that your life was so terribly routine that every single day was pretty much the same. As a result, at the end of your life, you would only have lived just one day.

这是因为，正如捷克作家米兰·昆德拉所写，“记忆只保留了生活的百万分之一、一亿分之一，简而言之，是极其微小的片段。” ³就好像，在我们的一生中，我们只保留了我们生活的少数快照。精彩部分。我们只活在自己的感觉中；我们只活在自己的故事中。

This is because, as the Czech writer Milan Kundera wrote, ‘Memory retains no more than a millionth, a hundred-millionth, in short an utterly infinitesimal bit of the lived life’.³ It is as if, during our lives, we only retain a handful of snapshots of what we have lived. The highlights. We live only to the extent of our feelings; we live only so far as our stories.

事实上，研究表明，人们往往会回忆起更多青少年时期发生的事情，而到了 20 多岁后期，这种回忆会逐渐减少。这可能是因为你在那个时期第一次经历了更多事情，但也因为你的情绪系统处于最强烈和最不受约束的状态（因为你的高级情绪调节仍在发展）。新奇感和情感强度共同创造了持久的记忆。

In fact, research shows that people tend to recall more events from their teenage years, tailing off into their late 20s. This is probably because you are encountering more experiences for the first time during that period, but also because your emotional systems are at their most intense and unconstrained (since your higher-order emotional regulation is still developing). Novelty and emotional intensity work hand in hand to create lasting memories.

我在这里所说的不仅仅是一种诗意的预感。心理学家戴维·伊格曼让参与者体验了一次可怕的 31 米自由落体，然后测量了他们对坠落时间的估计。4^他们的估计误差为 36%（与对其他人坠落的观察结果相比）。他的结论是，这种“时间膨胀”效应是回忆的结果，而不是感知的结果——情绪激动的经历会导致更丰富的编码，这反过来又扭曲了我们对它们的记忆。过着平淡的生活，你的生命就会萎缩。我们的生命以冒险来衡量，而不是以年数来衡量。

What I am saying here is more than a poetic hunch. The psychologist David Eagleman had participants experience a frightening free-fall of 31 metres, then measured their estimates of the time it took to fall.⁴ Their estimates were out by 36 per cent (as compared to observations of others’ falls). His conclusion was that this ‘time dilation’ effect was a consequence of recollection, not perception – emotionally charged experiences lead to richer encoding, which in turn distorts our memory of them. Live a dull life, your life shrinks. Our lives are measured in adventures, not years.

现在我们来问你：如果你知道所有平凡的部分都被抹去了，你的生活会有所不同吗？所有“常规”的东西都消失了？

So now we come to you: would you live your life differently if you knew that all the non-extraordinary bits are erased? That everything ‘routine’ is lost?

更重要的是：你对其他人来说是否与众不同？你以何种方式进入他人的故事？你是否将自己的存在视为体验设计的一部分？当你遇到的人回顾组成他们生活的零散碎片时，你会成为其中的一员，还是会像艾宾浩斯的三元组一样，一有机会就从记忆中消失？你是否在不经意间缩短了周围人的寿命？

More importantly: are you extraordinary for other people? In what way do you enter into other people’s stories? Do you think of your own personal presence as a piece of experience design? When the people you encounter look back at the scattered fragments that make up their lives, will you be among those fragments, or will you share the fate of Ebbinghaus’ trigrams – shed from memory at the first opportunity? Are you inadvertently shortening the lives of those around you?

如果你想从人们的记忆中消失，我可以告诉你一个秘密：穿你该穿的衣服，说你该说的话，做你该做的事。这样你几乎就如同从未存在过一样。

If you wish to vanish from living memory, I can tell you the secret: dress as you are expected to dress, say what you are expected to say, do what you are expected to do. That way it will be almost as if you never existed.

如今，我经常去各种机构的办公室，那里的员工都坐在小隔间里做着日常工作。这些隔间的墙上有时会贴上一些卡片。卡片通常是手写的。人们想感谢对方所做的工作，或者感谢对方为自己的人生带来的改变。你写过这样的卡片吗？这些小卡片可能会在隔间里贴上十年。它们很特别。

These days I get to travel to the offices of a wide variety of organizations in which people sit in small cubicles carrying out routine work. Occasionally there are cards pinned to the walls of these cubicles. They are usually hand-written. They are from people who wanted to thank that person for their work, or difference they made to their lives. Have you ever written such a card? These small cards may stay pinned to a cubicle for a decade. They are extraordinary.

非凡的事情可能很小。作为组织或个人，我们是否为非凡的经历创造了机会，并且我们是否庆祝非凡？

The extraordinary can be quite small. As organizations or individuals, do we create opportunities for the extraordinary experience, and do we celebrate the extraordinary?

这个问题对我们个人关系和教育背景都很重要。我们有责任创造非凡。非凡塑造了人们，只有非凡才能让人们记住。

This question matters to us both in our personal relationships and in the context of education. It is our responsibility to craft the extraordinary. The extraordinary is what shapes people, and it is only the extraordinary that they will remember.

变革性体验

Transformative experiences

如果我们试图改变人们，我们必须努力让他们摆脱常规，设计一种体验，这种体验将成为他们的一部分，并成为他们会讲述的故事。也许是他们会传递给他人的行为或关注。你可以带你的约会对象去看他们的第一场歌剧，这样做会创造一种非凡的体验，这种体验后来会成为他们的一部分，并成为他们会传递给后代的激情。

If we are trying to change people, we must endeavour to take them away from the routine and to design an experience that will become a part of who they are, and a story that they will tell. Perhaps a behaviour or concern that they will pass on to others. You might take your date to their first opera, and in so doing create an extraordinary experience that is later to become a part of who they are, and a passion they will pass on to future generations.

如果要改变一个人，这些经历必须与他产生深刻的情感联系。从本质上说，这正是教育失败的地方：它不是为改变人而设计的，它不是为了建立深厚的联系。

Such experiences must connect to an individual on a profound, emotional level if they are to be transformative. This, in essence, is where education fails: it is not designed to transform people, it is not intent on deep connections.

毫无疑问，一个人在接受教育的过程中确实会发生一些改变人生的经历：欺凌、体育上的成功、认为你一事无成的老师、告诉你只要下定决心就能实现任何目标的导师。这些都不是教育的目的，它们只是快乐和悲剧的学习意外。

Doubtless transformative experiences do occur during a person’s time in education: bullying, success at sports, the teacher who thought you would never amount to anything, the mentor who told you that you could achieve anything that you put your mind to. None of these are the intent of education, they are learning accidents of the happy and tragic kind.

在这些隔间里，除了感谢卡和家庭照片，你还会发现一些别的东西：远处海滩的照片。你是否有过这样的经历：有人向你展示他们的度假照片，你觉得自己应该假装兴奋，因为对方生动地解释道：“这是我们喝到最美味鸡尾酒的酒吧！这是我们每天去的海滩——看看那片海！这是我和海豚一起游泳的照片！这是我们的酒店房间！”

There is something else you will find pinned to those cubicles, next to the thank you cards and family pictures: pictures of a beach far away. Have you ever had that experience where someone shows you their holiday pictures and you feel you should feign excitement as the other person animatedly explains: ‘And this is the bar where we had the most amazing cocktail! And this is the spot we went to every day on the beach – just look at that sea! And this is me swimming with dolphins! And this is our hotel room!’

这不是很奇怪吗？你们俩可能都感觉到有些不对劲——他们拍照片是为了试图捕捉一种强烈的感觉。这些照片实际上相当乏味，但看着它们会让他们想起那种感觉，而对你来说却毫无意义。另一个人感觉到了这一点，并竭力用夸张的描述来弥补差距：“这个酒保太棒了——我知道这看起来像一个普通的酒吧，但气氛真是太棒了。”

Isn’t that odd? Probably both of you sense that something is slightly amiss – they took the pictures to try and capture an intensity of feeling. The pictures are actually quite dull, but looking at them brings back the feeling for them whilst it does nothing for you. The other person senses this and strains to close the gap with over-the-top descriptions: ‘This barman was amazing – I know it looks like an average bar, but the atmosphere was just incredible’.

这种现象——单凭照片往往无法传达体验——应该很常见。想象一下，你在清晨漫步在树林中。从眼角余光中，你瞥见了动静，转过头，看到了最神奇的景象：一只雄鹿从冷杉林间走出来，在不远处静静地吃草。你被这只雄伟的动物的出现迷住了。你伸手去拿相机，希望它不要飞走。当你抬起镜头时，雄鹿抬起了头。你拍了下来——鹿飞奔到森林深处。你很高兴拍到了这张照片。

This phenomenon – the frequent inability of mere photographs to convey an experience – should be familiar. Imagine you are taking an early morning stroll through the woods. From the corner of your eye you glimpse movement and turn your head to see the most magical thing: a stag has emerged from between the firs and is silently grazing a little distance away. You are transfixed by the presence of this majestic creature. You reach for your camera, hoping not to cause it to take flight. As you raise the lens, the stag raises its head. You take the shot – the deer bolts into the depths of the forest. You are thrilled that you got the photograph.

当你把这张照片展示给你的朋友时，你会发现他们并没有你希望的那么“激动”。公平地说，这张照片看起来只是一张构图很差的照片，上面有一些树，远处有某种动物。这种脱节是因为这种遭遇带来的纯粹情感冲击很难用视觉捕捉到。

On showing the photograph to your friends, you realize that they are a little less ‘whelmed’ than you would have hoped them to be. To be fair, the photo merely looks like a rather poorly composed picture of some trees, with some kind of animal in the distance. The disconnect happens because the sheer emotional impact of the encounter is not easily captured visually.

我们的生活就是这样度过的：试图通过故事、歌曲和图像分享我们的感受。当两个人关心同一件事时，一种联系建立起来。一位父亲带儿子去钓鱼，由此建立了终生的友谊。一位女士边喝咖啡边讲述发生在她身上的一件事；她的同伴解释了同样的事情是如何发生在她身上的，现在他们成了朋友。我们在收音机里听到一首歌，歌里唱的是我们爱过却从未爱过我们的人，这首歌充满了希望和痛苦，如此贴切地反映了我们的情感，我们迫不及待地想为朋友播放这首歌。有人问我们最喜欢的电影是什么，我们暗自希望这也是他们最喜欢的电影之一，从此我们便建立了联系。

Our lives are spent like this: trying to share what we feel through story, song and image. When two people care about the same thing, a connection is made. A father takes his son fishing, and in doing so forms a bond that will last a lifetime. Over coffee one woman tells a story about something that happened to her; her companion explains how a similar thing happened to her, and now they are friends. Over the radio we hear a song about a person that we loved but never loved us back, a song full of hope and pain, reflecting our sentiments so well that we can’t wait to play it for our friends. A person asks us about our favourite movie, and we quietly hope it will be one of theirs too, since then we will form a connection.

当人们适应一种新文化时，最能给他们带来不同体验的就是有人在身边帮助他们。如果我们真的想改变行为，我们必须首先了解当今人们行为方式的主导因素——或许可以通过倾听他们讲述自己的故事。

When people transition into a new culture, what makes the most difference to their experience is someone who is there to help. If we really wish to change behaviours, we must start by understanding the concerns that govern the way someone behaves today – perhaps through listening to the story they tell about themselves.

通常，改变人们的行为方式需要改变周围人的反应方式。当我们努力与某人建立联系时，我们的出发点必须是对他们最重要的事情。对人们来说，融入其中非常重要——因此，你只需改变惯例就能带来大规模的改变。在我的一生中，有两个惯例发生了巨大变化：去教堂和家庭聚餐。

Often, changing the way people act will necessitate changing the way people around them react. When we endeavour to form a connection with someone, our starting point must be those things that matter most to them. Something that matters deeply to people is fitting in – so you can effect change on a massive scale simply by shifting a convention. Two conventions that have changed dramatically in my lifetime are church-going and family dinners.

近年来，我们身边的数字媒体对情感的影响也呈指数级增长——几乎是一场“情感军备竞赛”。令我感到不安的是，在追求情感刺激的过程中，我们正在系统性地让自己对生活变得麻木不仁。

Recent years have also seen an exponential increase in the affective impact of the digital media surrounding us – almost an ‘emotional arms race’. It troubles me that in our pursuit of the emotionally stimulating, we are systematically desensitizing ourselves to life.

情感情境的科学研究

Scientific research for affective context

总结本章：我在这里展示的画面是人类思维，我们所说的话实际上只是复杂情感反应世界的表现，大部分隐藏在人们的视线之外。许多科学领域都支持这一模型，但您可能感兴趣的是迈克尔·加扎尼加进行的一项研究，他在研究中询问了裂脑患者^。5

To conclude this chapter: the picture that I have presented here is of a human mind where the things that we say are really just a manifestation of a complex world of affective reactions, largely hidden from sight. There are many areas of scientific support for this model, but one that might interest you is a piece of research carried out by Michael Gazzaniga in which he questioned split-brain patients.⁵

裂脑患者是指那些故意切断胼胝体（连接大脑两个半球的纤维）的人。虽然这听起来很可怕，但这种治疗方法对于某些慢性疾病（如严重癫痫）却很有效，可以防止癫痫发作扩散到整个大脑。然而，这种方法的副作用是，大脑的两侧随后会独立运作。由于两侧大脑分别控制一只手，因此可能会产生有趣的结果。

Split-brain patients are people for whom the corpus callosum – the fibres that connect the two halves of the brain – are deliberately severed. Horrifying as this sounds, it is a treatment that can be effective for certain kinds of chronic disorder, such as severe epilepsy, preventing the spread of seizures across the brain. It does, however, have the side effect that the two sides of the brain subsequently operate independently. Since each side controls a separate hand, this can lead to interesting results.

在一项实验中，大脑的一侧（没有语言能力的那一侧）被要求选择与图片相配的东西——这是一张雪堆的图片。手选择了一把铲子。大脑的另一侧只看到了一只鸡的图片。想象一下你是大脑的语言那一半：你看到了一只鸡，你看到你的另一只手拿起了一把铲子，你会想：“我为什么要拿起铲子！？”参与者问他们为什么选择铲子（因为有语言能力的大脑那部分只能看到鸡），他们会很快给出合理化解释，比如：“嗯，你需要一把铲子来清理鸡舍。”

In one experiment, one side of the brain (the side without language ability) was asked to choose something to go with a picture – which was a picture of a snow drift. The hand chose a shovel. The other side of the brain only saw a picture of a chicken. So imagine you are the language half of your brain: you see a chicken, and you see your other hand pick up a shovel and you think: ‘Why the blazes did I pick up a shovel!?’ Participants asked why they had chosen a shovel (given that the part of the brain with language ability could only see a chicken) would quickly give rationalizations such as: ‘Well, you need a shovel to clean up the chicken shed’.

这很好地说明了我们多么容易为自己的行为找到合理的解释，以及我们的大脑如何向我们隐藏其内部运作。毫无疑问，我们在司法偏见研究中遇到的每一位法官，如果被问到，都会为他们的“有罪”或“无罪”判决提出详尽的辩解。但你我都知道，这其实都是为了午餐。

It’s a nice illustration of how easily we come up with rational explanations for our actions, and of how our own mind hides its inner workings from us. No doubt each of the judges we encountered in the judicial bias research would, if asked, come up with elaborate justifications of their ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ verdicts. But you and I know it’s really all about the lunch.

现在我们已经介绍了体验和资源以及它们所起的作用，您可能想知道在什么情况下应该构建资源，在什么情况下应该设计体验。哪些资源对人们最有帮助，哪些体验会改变人们？一旦您理解了学习，您就会明白需要围绕受众关心的事情来设计学习。

Now that we have covered both experiences and resources and the role that they play, you may be wondering in which circumstances you should build resources and in which you should design experiences. What resources will help people most, and which experiences will transform people? Once you have understood learning, you will understand the need to design learning around the things that matter to your audience.

幸运的是，有一个过程可以做到这一点——以人为本的学习设计——在下一章中我们将探讨它是如何运作的。

Fortunately, there is a process for doing this - human-centred learning design – and in the next chapter we are going to explore how it works.

“没有唯一正确的答案或前进的道路，但有一个正确的方法来构建问题。”

‘There is no single right answer or path forward, but there is one right way to frame the problem.’

克莱顿·克里斯滕森

CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN

日复一日，我们不愿意太深入地思考自己在做什么；我们依靠惯例、惯例和简单的合理化来将认知负荷保持在最低限度，这样我们就可以担心其他事情——比如我们应该穿什么，喝什么茶。因此，告诉人们他们应该从头开始重新思考自己在做什么至少可以说是令人不安的。

Day to day, we prefer not to think too deeply about what we are doing; we rely on routines, conventions and pocket-sized rationalizations to keep the cognitive load to a minimum so that we can worry about other things – like what we should wear, or have for tea. So telling people that they should rethink what they are doing from the ground up can be disconcerting to say the least.

说实话，人们并不太受思维的影响——他们真的在生活中摸索着，做他们感兴趣的事情，或者别人对他们的期望（即不会让他们难堪），或者只是做任何感觉正确的事情。我希望我能让你对不同的工作方式感到兴奋，但除非我能找到让情感语境模型感觉正常和正确的方法，否则它可能就到此为止了。

And people aren’t much influenced by thinking, to be honest – really they feel their way through life, doing what they are excited about, or is expected of them (i.e. not going to embarrass them), or just whatever feels right. I hope I can excite you about a different way of working, but unless there are ways I can make the affective context model feel normal and right, it will probably end there.

好消息是，在过去的几十年里，情感情境模型的研究已经产生了一些应用于实践的技术，我想在这里分享这些技术。

The good news is that over the past couple of decades, working with the affective context model has resulted in some techniques for applying it in practice, and I wanted to share those here.

首先要说的是，将情感情境模型付诸实践很快就会开始看起来像以人为本的学习设计。原因很简单：如果我们的关注点驱动我们的学习，那么我们就无法在不首先了解一个人的关注点的情况下设计“学习内容”。这立即导致两种选择：要么有人确实关心某事（在这种情况下我们应该考虑资源），要么他们不关心但应该关心（在这种情况下我们应该考虑体验）。

The first thing to say is that putting the affective context model into action very quickly starts to look like human-centred learning design. There is a simple reason for this: if our concerns drive our learning, then we can’t design ‘learning stuff’ without first understanding the concerns that a person has. This immediately leads to two options: either someone does care about something (in which case we should be thinking about resources), or they don’t and should (in which case we should be thinking about experiences).

以人为本的设计理念并不新鲜，但如果没有支撑它的模型，它仍然可能出错。让我回到我之前举的一个例子：这是孩子上学的第一天；以下是三种学习设计方法：

The idea of human-centred design is not new, but without a model that underpins it, it is still possible to go wrong. Let me return to an example I used earlier: it is a child’s first day at school; here are three types of learning design approach:

1. 以下是你需要了解的内容（由当局决定）和你应该阅读的文件的列表。这是传统的学习方法，我在上面称之为“内容倾倒”。

2. Here is a list of the things you need to know (as decided by the authorities) and documents you should read. This is the conventional approach to learning, which I have called ‘content dumping’ above.

3. 根据你需要做的事情（上课、找老师、避免被留堂），这里收集了一些有用的材料。这要好得多，反映了传统的绩效支持方法，即我们花时间了解人们想要实现的目标。

4. Based on the things you need to be able to do (get to class, identify teachers, avoid detention), here is a collection of helpful material. This is a lot better, and reflects the conventional performance-support approach, where we take time to find out what people are trying to achieve.

5. 根据您所关心的事情（融入、交朋友、不让自己出丑）以及您在追求这些关注点时需要能够做的事情，这里收集了一些有用的资源。这是一种更好的方法，因为真正推动一个人学习的是一个人的关注点。仅仅关注他们正在做的事情只能让你走这么远。

6. Based on the things you are concerned about (fitting in, making friends, not making a fool of yourself), together with the things you need to be able to do in the pursuit of these concerns, here is a collection of useful resources. This is an even better approach, since what is really driving a person’s learning is a person’s concerns. Just focusing on the things they are doing will only take you so far.

我想要解释的核心思想是，首先了解人们的任务和关注点，其次设计资源或体验作为学习解决方案的一部分。如果你能够将其应用到你的学习计划中，它可能会在三个方面带来巨大的转变：

This idea, of first understanding people’s tasks and concerns, and second designing either resources or experiences as part of a learning solution, is the central idea I want to explain. If you are able to apply it to your learning programmes, it will likely bring about a dramatic shift in three things:

1. 这些项目的成功程度（例如，学习者是否选择使用它们）

2. how successful those programmes are (for example, whether learners choose to use them or not)

3. 对行为的影响

4. the impact on behaviour

5. 该计划的经验¹

6. the experience of the programme¹

毋庸置疑，如果您想实现不同的结果，您就需要改变学习设计的方式——那么……应该怎么做呢？

It goes without saying that if you want to achieve different outcomes, you will need to change the way that you are doing learning design – so… how should it be done?

5Di 学习设计模型

The 5Di learning design model

在过去的十年左右，我一直在使用一种我称之为 5Di 的设计流程（因为——让我们面对现实——如果你没有一个朗朗上口的缩写，你就不会取得太大的进步）。下面是总结。

Over the past decade or so, I’ve been using a design process that I have called the 5Di (because – let’s face it – if you don’t have a catchy acronym you won’t make much progress). Here it is, summarized.

我想依次解释每个步骤，但在此之前，也许我应该指出，在进行设计之前，如果你真正花时间去了解构成当前绩效状况的任务和关注点，那么任何一个过程都会比传统的培训设计方法产生更好的结果。

I’d like to explain each of the steps in turn, but before I do perhaps I should point out that any process where you really take time to understand the tasks and concerns that together make up the current picture of performance, before engaging in design, will deliver better outcomes than conventional training design approaches.

1 定义

1 Define

我们必须拯救学习。我们必须拯救学习，因为如今几乎每个人都有这样一种可怕的想法：学习就是用任何必要的手段把信息塞进人们的脑袋里。即使那些没有意识到自己相信这一点的人，也确实如此。

We have to rescue learning. We have to rescue learning because these days almost everybody has this horrible idea that learning is somehow about stuffing information into people’s heads by any means necessary. Even people who don’t realize that they believe that, really do.

如果您从事学习或教育工作，您将会遇到以下情况：本质上，有人带着他们想让人们知道的一些东西来找您，然后他们说：“我们已经决定每个人都需要知道这些信息。请使用您的教学设计魔法来创建课程。”

If you work in learning or education, you will have encountered this in the following way: in essence, someone approaches you with some stuff that they want people to know and they say: ‘We’ve decided that everyone needs to know this information. Please use your instructional design wizardry to create a course.’

我的意思是，基本的假设是，学习就是知识转移（将信息从一个地方转移到一个人的头脑中），而你的工作就是实现这一点。

What I mean is that the basic set of assumptions is that learning is knowledge transfer (moving information from one location, into a person’s head) and that your job is to make this happen.

例如，人们非常喜欢“学习目标”的概念，它通常是学习结束时人们应该“知道”或“意识到”的事情的清单。学习目标往往是一个奇怪仪式的尖端，这个仪式始于所谓的“培训需求分析”，旨在决定人们需要多少培训。

As an example, people are very fond of the idea of ‘learning objectives’, which usually end up being a list of the things people should ‘know’ or ‘be aware of’ at the end of the learning. Learning objectives are often the pointy end of a bizarre ritual that begins with something called a ‘training needs analysis’, which endeavours to decide how much training people need.

当然，问题就在于名称上：无论问题是什么，这个过程都假设培训就是答案（这有点像“棉花糖需求分析”——即确定每个人需要多少棉花糖的过程）。事实证明，培训永远不是答案——如果我们所说的“培训”是指“内容倾销”。

The problem is in the name, of course: the process assumes that training is the answer, whatever the problem (it is a bit like a ‘Marshmallow Needs Analysis’ – i.e. a process to determine how many marshmallows everybody needs). And as it turns out, training is never the answer – if by ‘training’ we mean ‘content dumping’.

培训需求分析通常是通过四处询问重要人物，询问他们认为不太重要的人需要知道什么来进行的。他们通常不乏想法。

Quite often a training needs analysis is conducted by wandering around asking important people what they think less important people need to know. They usually have no shortage of ideas.

然后构建一个反映主要利益相关者意见的课程（这样可以让他们满意），随后让那些为了午餐和聊天而参与其中并且并不真的想让我们失业的困惑的员工接受这个课程。

A course is then constructed which reflects the opinions of key stakeholders (so keeps them happy) and is subsequently inflicted on bemused employees who play along for the sake of lunch and a chat and don’t really want to put us out of a job.

我们剩下要做的就是隐藏缺乏任何明显影响的事实——这个过程由一个听起来很花哨的评估模型来促进，该模型允许我们暗示如果人们喜欢这种体验就会带来某种商业利益。

All that remains is for us to hide the lack of any discernible impact – a process facilitated by a fancy-sounding evaluation model that allows us to imply some kind of business benefit if people liked the experience.

总体而言，该模型假设生产力与所谓的“能力”有关，并且可以通过培训来提高。然而，真正的人永远不会“提高他们的能力”（如果你愿意，你可以问他们）——相反，他们正在尝试做某事或其他事情，除非你真的在帮助他们做他们想做的事情，否则你的努力不太可能产生太大的效果。有人和他们谈过他们想做什么吗？可能没有。

Overall, the model assumes that productivity relates to something called ‘capability’, and that this is improved by training. However, real people are never ‘improving their capability’ (you can ask them if you like) – instead, they are trying to do something or other, and unless you are actually helping them with the things they are trying to do, it is unlikely your efforts will have much effect. Did anyone talk to them about what they are trying to do? Probably not.

我的观点是，如果你想阻止可怕的事情发生，你就需要表明立场。你需要说这样的话：“太好了！但我们能不能先把学习目标放在一边，谈谈如果这个项目成功了，人们将能够做些什么？例如，我们会看到他们的行为有什么不同？”当然，这也使得评估该项目最终是否成功变得非常容易。

My point is that if you want to stop something terrible happening, this is where you need to take a stand. You need to say something like: ‘Wonderful! But can we just set the learning objectives aside for a minute and talk about what it is that people will be able to do if this programme is a success? How, for example, would we see them behaving differently?’ Of course, this also makes it very much easier to assess whether or not the programme has been a success at the end.

换句话说，在学习设计过程的开始阶段，有一个关键的机会可以将谈话从人们应该在头脑中保留什么信息转变为人们应该做些什么不同的事情。

In other words, at the beginning of a learning design process there is a critical opportunity to divert the conversation from being one about what information people should hold in their heads to one about what people should do differently.

正如您上面看到的，我们将学习重新定义为“由于记忆而导致的行为或能力的改变” - 因此存在一个非常现实的风险，即即使我们成功地让人们记住东西，学习也不会以任何形式发生，而只会以非常简单的意义发生（这通常是我们在培训课程中看到的）。

As you saw above, we have redefined learning as ‘a change in behaviour or capability as a result of memory’ – so there is a very real risk that, even if we are successful at getting people to remember stuff, learning will not have taken place in anything but a very trivial sense (and this is often what we see on training courses).

在定义阶段，我们根据结果而不是学习目标来定义成果。我所说的“结果”是指我们试图实现的可衡量的变化。

During the define stage, we define the outcome in terms of results, not learning objectives. By ‘results’ I mean the measurable change that we are trying to bring about.

我发现，在这些对话中，有一种技巧很有用，那就是列出三栏，标题分别为“想”、“感觉”、“做”，然后询问人们，学习计划将如何改变这些内容。例如，人们会觉得多样性真的很重要吗？如果他们看到不安全的东西，他们会说出来吗？他们会花更多钱来指导他们的团队吗？

A technique that I sometimes find useful for these conversations is to draw up three columns titled ‘Think’, ‘Feel’, ‘Do’ and to ask people how these will change as a result of the learning programme. For example, will people feel that diversity is genuinely important? Will they speak up if they see something unsafe? Will they spend more on coaching their teams?

虽然这看起来只是一小步，但却能带来巨大的帮助：如果没有它，就会出现这样的情况：“好的，我们已经同意了学习目标，让我们开始列出我们应该涵盖的所有主题吧！”让我们明确一点：没有学习目标，也没有主题。如果你发现自己正在讨论学习目标和主题，那么你几乎肯定已经迷失了方向，离掉进标有“教育”的未盖盖子的井盖只有一步之遥。

While this might seem like a small step, it can be tremendously helpful: without it, something like this tends to happen: ‘OK, we’ve agreed the learning objectives, let’s start listing all the topics we should cover!’ Let’s be clear: there are no learning objectives, there are no topics. If you find yourself in a conversation about learning objectives and topics, you have almost certainly already lost your way and are one step away from falling into the uncovered manhole signposted ‘education’.

相反，只有行为和关注点会发生变化，而我们可以采用的方法会带来这些变化——正如我们将看到的，这些方法要么是资源，要么是经验。就经验而言，几乎没有“内容”。

Instead, there are only behaviours and concerns that will change, and the methods which we can employ to bring about these changes – which, as we will see, are either resources or experiences. In the case of experiences there is very little ‘content’ as such.

就资源而言，内容非常丰富，但我们无法假设人们是否选择将其存储在自己的头脑中。如果他们愿意，他们可以这样做，但这完全取决于他们自己。

In the case of resources, there is lots of content but we make no assumption about whether or not someone chooses to store it in their heads. They can if they like, but that is entirely up to them.

从某种意义上说，我们完全不再担心学习。相反，我们担心如何帮助人们做他们关心的事情，或者创造机会去关心新事物。

In a sense, we stop worrying about learning entirely. Instead, we worry about helping people to do things they care about, or creating opportunities to care about something new.

2 发现

2 Discover

这是最重要的一步，这一步使这种方法不同于你使用过的任何其他学习设计方法。在这里，你做了一件非常激进的事情：你实际上与你正在为其设计学习计划的人交谈。

This is the most important step, the step that makes this approach different from any other learning design approach you have used. Here you do something really radical: you actually talk to the people you are designing a learning programme for.

想象一下，一家庞大的跨国公司，生产产品并出售给客户。它有一个复杂的价值链——在普通人看来语言意味着业务的许多部分共同协作来生产产品：采购、物流、运营、制造、零售、战略、营销、人力资源等等。

Imagine a vast, multinational organization that produces products that it sells to its customers. It has a complex value chain – which in normal-person language means that there are lots of parts of the business that all work together to produce the products: procurement, logistics, operations, manufacturing, retail, strategy, marketing, HR and so on.

和大多数公司一样，他们经常推出新产品，以扩大业务规模和利润。但他们最近注意到产品销售数据中存在一个令人不安的趋势：他们的成功有点碰运气。有些产品卖得很好，有些则惨不忍睹。他们试图通过向失败的产品投入更多营销预算，并想出奇怪而又奇妙的激励方案来鼓励人们购买这些产品来解决这个问题。但这些方法不起作用。

Like most companies, they are regularly coming up with new products in an effort to grow the size of their business and their profits. But they have recently noticed a disturbing trend in their product sales data: their success is a bit hit-and-miss. Some of the products sell well, others bomb. They have tried to tackle this by throwing more marketing budget at their failing products, and coming up with weird and wonderful incentive schemes to encourage people to buy them. But it’s not working.

然后有人指出他们还没有尝试过的事情：他们还没有尝试让客户参与到产品设计中。有人立即反驳道，引用亨利·福特的话：“如果我问客户想要什么，他们会说‘更快的马’！”但建议并不是真正询问人们他们想要什么产品，而是了解他们的驱动力——我的意思是，如果我们通过与人们交谈发现他们希望更快地从 A 到达 B，那么我们可能有一些方法可以帮助他们实现这一目标。

And then someone points out something they haven’t tried: they haven’t tried involving their customers in the design of their products. Someone immediately objects, quoting Henry Ford: ‘If I had asked what my customers wanted, they would have said “faster horses”!’ But the proposal is not really to ask people what products they want, but to understand what drives them – I mean, if by talking to people we discover that they want to get from A to B faster, there might be a few ways we could help them achieve that.

这个故事听起来很奇怪，但这正是公司几十年来一直在做的事情——而且今天仍在做。通用电气目前是美国收入排名第 13 大的公司，该公司最近推出了一种名为 FastWorks ^{2 的}新产品开发方法，其本质是让客户参与产品设计过程。

Strange as this story sounds, it is precisely what companies have done for decades – and are still doing today. General Electric, currently ranked as the 13th-largest company in the United States by revenue, recently introduced a new product development approach called FastWorks,² which is – in essence – about involving their customers in the product design process.

似乎很难理解为什么公司不考虑这样做，但当你有很多部门和流程时，客户——嗯——只会妨碍你。他们代表着一种风险——一种你可能不得不改变现状或承认自己错了的风险。

It may seem hard to understand why companies don’t think to do this, but when you have lots of departments and processes the customers – well – just get in the way. They represent a risk – a risk that you might have to change things, or admit that you are wrong.

与学习者交谈

Talking to learners

这与我们学习和教育领域的情况非常类似：这是一个复杂的系统，包含许多惯例和流程，如果我们与客户讨论我们的产品和服务，他们可能会告诉我们一些我们不想听到的事情。例如，学校很无聊，培训很浪费时间。

This is an excellent analogy for what we do in learning and education: it’s a complex system, with lots of conventions and processes, and if we talked to our customers about our products and services there is a risk they might tell us things we don’t want to hear. Like, for example, how school is boring, or training a waste of time.

事实上，他们确实会告诉我们这些事情。我女儿几乎每天结束时都会告诉我这些。但教育不会问人们关心什么，学习与发展也不会问。

In point of fact, they do tell us these things. My daughter tells me this at the end of almost every single day. But education doesn’t ask people what they care about, so neither does L&D.

^{几十年来，简·哈特一直在调查组织中的数千名学习者，并将}调查结果发布在她的网站上。3人们一直表示不喜欢电子学习，认为它几乎毫无用处。尽管如此，围绕电子学习产品已经发展出了一个完整的行业，大学也热切地期待着这成为其发展的下一步。

Jane Hart has been surveying thousands of learners in organizations for decades now, and publishing the results on her website.³ People consistently report that they dislike e-learning and find it next to useless. Despite this, an entire industry has grown up around e-learning production, and universities are hungrily eyeing this as a potential next step in their evolution.

没有人建议我们为学习者提供他们喜欢的“果冻和蛋糕”选项；但是，例如，如果我们问学习者他们想要完成什么，而他们所要说的只是“通过你设置的测试”，这应该让我们停下来思考。也许他们会说：“找一份好工作”——在这种情况下，我们可能需要发现对于这个人来说，什么才是“好”，以及提供这些工作的雇主在寻找什么。他们可能会说：“让我的父母高兴”。在人生的哪个阶段，人们应该停止只为取悦父母而做事？30 岁？45 岁？永远不要？

No one is suggesting a ‘jelly and cake’ option in which we give learners whatever they enjoy; but if, for example, we ask learners what they are trying to accomplish and all they have to say is ‘Pass the tests that you set’, this should give us pause for thought. Perhaps they might say: ‘Get a good job’ – in which case we might need to discover what, exactly, would count as ‘good’ for this person, and what employers with those jobs are looking for. They might say: ‘Keep my parents happy’. At what point in life should people stop doing things just to please their parents? At 30? At 45? Never?

但通过将个人置于设计过程的核心，我们可以彻底改变我们所设计的东西的吸引力和有效性——不是因为我们让他们做设计，而是因为我们的设计是对人们关心的事情的回应，这反过来又推动了行为（比如购买或学习）。那么我们该怎么做呢？

But by putting the individual at the heart of the design process, we can bring about a radical shift in the appeal and effectiveness of the things that we design – not because we let them do the design, but because our design is a response to what matters to them, which in turn drives behaviour (such as purchasing or learning). So how do we do this?

在发现阶段，我们会与人们讨论他们的顾虑和任务。这与传统的“培训需求分析”完全不同。听众的“顾虑”是他们关心的事情——他们担心的事情，也许会让他们彻夜难眠。他们的“任务”是他们花费最多时间做的事情——占用他们时间的活动。

During the discover stage, we talk to people about their concerns and tasks. This is not at all like the traditional ‘training needs analysis’. An audience’s ‘concerns’ are the things they care about – the things they worry about, which perhaps keep them awake at night. Their ‘tasks’ are the things that they are spending most time doing – the activities that occupy their time.

这两件事可能会有重叠——例如，一个人可能花费大量时间参加会议，并担心自己在会议上的表现。

These two things may well overlap – for example, a person may spend a lot of time in meetings, and worry about how they come across in meetings.

情绪曲线

The emotional curve

有多种工具可用于了解关注点和任务。最简单的方法之一是让人们列出他们的“十大任务”和“十大关注点”。在某些情况下，您可能能够预测其中的大部分任务，并向人们提供卡片，让他们按顺序排列 - 这使得进行统计分析变得更加容易。

There are a number of tools one can use to get at concerns and tasks. One of the simplest is to get people to list their ‘top 10 tasks’ and ‘top 10 concerns’. In some cases, you may be able to anticipate the majority of these and give people cards that they can put in order – which makes it easier to do some statistical analysis.

但这种方法可能无法触及问题的核心，因为人们不习惯思考他们的“担忧”——坦率地说，没有人愿意去问他们——所以另一种选择，即“情绪曲线”，可能会有所帮助。

But this technique can fail to get to the heart of the matter, because people aren’t used to thinking about their ‘concerns’ – frankly, no one has ever bothered to ask them – so an alternative, the ‘emotional curve’, can be helpful.

情绪曲线由个人绘制，代表他们在一段时间内的感受。这段时间可以从一周到几个月不等。通常，曲线是为过渡期绘制的——例如，加入一家公司、上学第一天、搬到一个新国家。每个人都被要求绘制一条曲线，代表他们在一段时间内的旅程，以及他们的感受如何从高到低变化，包括沿途任何重要的里程碑。

An emotional curve is drawn by an individual and represents their feelings over a period of time. The period can range from a week to months. Often, the curve is drawn for a transition period – for example, joining a company, the first day at school, moving to a new country. Each individual is asked to draw a curve that represents their journey over a period of time and how their feelings ranged from high to low, including along the way any milestones of significance.

一旦人们画好了曲线，他们就会被要求与小组分享并讲述故事。当人们开始讲述故事时，你就能知道他们真正关心的是什么。

Once people have drawn their curve, they are asked to share it with the group and tell the story. And when people start to tell a story, you can see what they really care about.

我知道这听起来有点感情用事，但除了具有治疗作用外，它还非常能揭示真正推动学习过程的担忧和感受。如果你听人们的故事，你就能很快知道什么可能对他们有帮助，以及他们渴望学习什么。事实上，“情感曲线”是一种用户旅程。

It sounds a bit touchy-feely, I know, but besides being therapeutic it is also remarkably revealing regarding the concerns and feelings that are really driving the learning process. If you listen to people’s stories you can very quickly get a good idea of what might help them, and what things they are keen to learn. In fact, the ‘emotional curve’ is a type of user journey.

这种方法的优势在于，设计过程以客户体验为出发点，并考虑如何改善它，而不是完全忽略它。

The power of this approach is that the design process takes as its starting point the customer experience and considers how to improve it, rather than simply ignoring it altogether.

考虑图 8.2中的例子。这不是一条实际的曲线，而是基于我多年来听到的数百个新领导人的故事而合成的。但让我们想象一下这是鲍勃的故事。

Consider the example in Figure 8.2. This is not an actual curve, but a composite based on hundreds of new leaders’ stories that I have heard over the years. But let’s imagine that it is Bob’s story.

当你听人们讲述他们的故事时，你会被以下几点所震撼：首先，当人们有机会谈论他们的经历和感受时，感觉真是太棒了。令人惊讶的是，有些人几乎没有机会分享他们正在经历的事情——这可能部分解释了企业培训活动和辅导如此受欢迎的原因。

When you listen to people tell their stories, you will be struck by a number of things: first, how great it feels for people to be given the opportunity to talk about what they have experienced and how it felt. It is remarkable how little opportunity some people have to share what they are going through – and probably accounts in part for the popularity of corporate training events and coaching.

其次，一个人的活动在多大程度上是由他们关心的事情驱动的。最后，无论一个人是开始上学还是找到新工作，有多少机会可以支持他的感受和表现。

Second, how much of a person’s activity is driven by the things that they care about. Finally, how many missed opportunities there are to support people in how they feel and how they perform, whether the person is starting school or a new job.

让我们以鲍勃为例。如果鲍勃很高兴成为一名领导者，我们为什么不充分利用他的热情呢？也许可以在公司内部宣传这一点。如果他不确定在新角色中该做什么，为什么不给他提供一份清单呢？

Let’s take Bob’s example. If Bob is delighted at being a leader, why don’t we make the most of that enthusiasm? Perhaps publicize it within the company. If he is unsure of what to do in his new role, why not provide him with a checklist?

鲍勃感到孤立无援，心神不宁——但他又担心会给他的经理留下不好的印象，所以为什么不从组织的其他部门给他找一位导师，顺便从高层领导那里获取一些关于如何给人留下良好印象的建议呢？他真的不知道人们对领导者的期望是什么。

Bob feels isolated and uncertain – but worried about giving the wrong impression to his manager, so why not find him a mentor from another part of the organization and – while we are at it – capture some advice from senior leaders on creating a good impression? He doesn’t really know what is expected of a leader.

观看公司员工谈论他们对领导者的期望和价值的视频可能会对他有所帮助，或者准备一份一页纸的讲义，介绍领导力中应该做的事情和不应该做的事情。

It might help him to watch some videos of people in his company talking about what they expect, and value, from leaders – or maybe have a one-page handout on the dos and don’ts of leadership.

如果移交过程看起来很糟糕，那么列出一份要审查的文件和系统清单怎么样？如果鲍勃倾向于微观管理，而不是授权和指导，那么也许对这两个领域的一些指导以及实践机会会有所帮助。为项目招募人员第一次可能会令人困惑，因此，一步一步的指南、一份好的面试问题列表和面试过程中的人力资源合作伙伴可能会有所帮助。

If the handover process seems poor, how about a shopping list of documents and systems to review? If Bob has a tendency to micro-manage rather than delegate and coach, maybe some guidance on both areas would be helpful, together with an opportunity to practise. Recruiting people for the first time can be confusing, so a step-by-step guide, a list of good interview questions and an HR partner in the interview process would probably help.

由于从未创建过“团队愿景”，鲍勃可能也希望得到一些关于如何正确开展此类会议的指导——但当需要进行艰难的对话时，简单的资源可能还不够。很明显，鲍勃并不太在意他的批评可能产生的影响，或者他不理解。也许这是鲍勃可以从经验中受益的领域——一个练习提供反馈的机会——以及一个确保鲍勃定期收到反馈的系统。

Having never created a ‘team vision’, Bob would probably also appreciate some guidance around the right way to run this kind of session – but when it comes to having difficult conversations, it may be that a simple resource might not be enough. It seemed clear that Bob didn’t care much about the impact his criticism might have, or didn’t understand. Maybe this is an area where Bob would benefit from an experience – a chance to practise giving feedback – and for that matter, a system that ensures that Bob regularly receives feedback.

读到这里，你可能会想：“其中有些严格来说不是学习”。我想就此向你提出挑战：你真正的意思是：“其中有些严格来说不是教育”。换句话说，你也可能持有这种根深蒂固的信念，即学习就是让人们记住一些东西，而“学习”应该是这样的——一份要记住的事情的清单。

Reading this, you may have thought: ‘Some of that isn’t strictly learning’. I would like to challenge you on that: what you really mean is: ‘Some of that isn’t strictly education’. In other words, you too may hold this deeply held belief that learning is about getting people to memorize stuff, and that this is what ‘learning’ should look like – a list of things to remember.

总之，我对“发现”阶段的观点是：如果你花时间与人们一起设计，当你为人们设计时，它真的会有所回报。你几乎立刻就会看到资源如何帮助他们，或者经验如何推动他们。

In conclusion, my point about the ‘discovery’ phase is this: if you take the time to design with people when you design for people, it really pays off. Almost immediately you will see how resources might help them, or experiences might push them.

如果你已经看过我上面的例子，你可能会开始怀疑这是否真的是我们所认为的“学习”——这正是我要说的。学习并不在你的掌控之中：它不是把信息塞进人们脑袋里的问题。你可以通过体验设计为学习创造合适的条件，或者在满足这些条件时提供合适的材料——但学习本身并不在你的掌控之中。

If you have followed my example above, you may have begun to wonder if this is really what we think of as ‘learning’ at all – and this is precisely what I am getting at. The learning is not in your control: it is not a matter of shovelling information into people’s heads. You can create the right conditions for learning via experience design, or provide the right materials when those conditions are met – but the learning itself is out of your hands.

你可能会发现在这样的群组中询问其他类型的问题很有用 - 例如，人们今天需要帮助时会去哪里，他们使用什么技术，他们今天发现什么最有用 - 以及哪些事情最令人沮丧。

There are other kinds of questions that you may find useful to ask in such groups – for example, where people go when they need help today, what technologies they use, what they find most helpful today – and which things are the most frustrating.

3 设计

3 Design

当你花时间了解人们关心什么以及他们正在尝试做什么时，设计想法往往会很自然地呈现出来。

Design ideas tend to present themselves quite naturally when you spend time finding out what people care about, and what they are trying to do.

再次强调，我们必须杜绝这种为了方便而制定的阴谋，即列出我们想让人们知道的事情的清单，将它们塞进课程中，然后强迫人们以某种​​方式接受它。“学习目标”、“主题”和“内容”这些词都应该被视为警告信号——它们强烈暗示有人在想方设法地推销内容。相反，我们应该用“任务”和“关注点”、“资源”和“经验”来代替。

Once again – we have to put a stop to the conspiracy of convenience in which we draw up a list of things we want people to know, shove them into a course, and force people to consume it somehow. The words ‘learning objectives’, ‘topics’ and ‘content’ should all be considered warning signs – they strongly suggest that somebody has content dumping in mind. Instead, we should substitute ‘tasks’ and ‘concerns’, ‘resources’ and ‘experiences’.

在设计一个人们可以学习的环境时，我们只会做两件事之一：要么我们设计体验，让人们关心他们以前不关心的事情，要么我们了解他们关心什么，并设计资源来支持帮助他们完成他们想做的事情。所有学习活动都属于这两类中的一类，有时（例如，在指导的情况下）两者都有。

In designing an environment where people can learn, we are only ever doing one of two possible things: either we are designing experiences designed to make people care about something they didn’t before, or we understand what they care about and we are designing resources that will support them in doing what they are trying to do. All learning activities fall into one of these two categories, sometimes (for example, with mentoring) both.

现在我们知道了人们关心什么以及他们想做什么，事情就变得容易多了。我经常使用的一种技术是 CTRE 矩阵（关注点 - 任务 - 资源 - 体验矩阵）。它听起来比实际要复杂得多。本质上，我们在网格的左侧列出人们的任务和关注点，在顶部列出我们正在考虑的一些格式 - 诸如视频、指南、清单、信息图等格式（下面有更长的格式列表）。

Now that we know what people care about and what they are trying to do, things get a lot easier. One technique that I have used a lot is the CTRE matrix (Concern–Task–Resource-Experience matrix). It sounds more sophisticated than it is. In essence, we list the tasks and concerns that people have along the left-hand side of a grid, and some of the formats that we are considering along the top – formats such as video, guide, checklist, infographic and so on (there’s a longer list of formats below).

此时，我们可能会注意到，我们希望某人关注的某件事（例如数据保护）实际上并不在他们的列表中，因此我们将其添加到左侧。如果我们认为某件事确实需要经验，我们还会添加一列“经验”。表 8.1 显示了新手的 CTRE 矩阵模板的简化版本。

At this point, we may notice that something we want someone to be concerned about – say, data protection – isn’t actually on their list, so we add it on the left-hand side. We also add a column for ‘experience’ in the event that we decide something really requires an experience. Table 8.1 shows a simplified version of a CTRE matrix template for a new starter.

下一步是逐行填充此网格，并确定最适合的格式。例如，如果有人感觉很孤独，我们可能会为他们安排一个伙伴（经验）和一份他们可以加入的网络的一页指南（资源）。

The next step is to populate this grid, working line by line, and deciding on the format(s) which will work best. So, for example, if someone is feeling pretty lonely we might set them up with a buddy (experience) and a one-page guide to networks that they can join (resource).

正如您立即看到的，这更多的是“绩效支持”，而不是“内容倾倒”。我们并不期望他们记住列表中的所有网络，然后通过测试来证明他们能够记住它们。

As you can immediately see, this is much more about ‘performance support’ than it is ‘content dumping’. We are not expecting them to memorize all the networks on the list, then pass a test to show that they can recall them.

当谈到在设备上接收电子邮件时，一页指南可能效果最好，如果程序复杂，也许可以看一小段演示视频。同样，人们可能只需要设置一次电子邮件——因此人们不会期望该资源会带来学习，因为个人不太可能反复使用它（除非他们加入 IT 部门，并将代表多个用户设置电子邮件访问权限）。

When it comes to getting emails on a device, it may be that a one-page guide works best, and perhaps if the procedure is complex a short demonstration video. Here, again, people may only need to set up their emails once – so one would not anticipate that the resource would result in learning since the individual is unlikely to use it over and over again (unless, say, they are joining the IT department and will be setting up email access on behalf of multiple users).

关于哪种格式效果最好，没有明确的答案；这在很大程度上取决于具体用例和个人。然而，有三件事需要考虑：首先，让不同的人（包括观众）帮助做出这些设计决策是个好主意。一张纸或一个移动应用程序格式是否效果最好可能完全取决于人们何时可能会使用它们。

There is no definitive answer as to which format will work best; it depends largely on the specific use case and also on the individual. There are three things to consider, however: first, it’s a good idea to have a diverse group of people (including people from the audience) help make these design decisions. Whether or not a piece of paper or a mobile app format works best may depend entirely on precisely when someone is likely to use them.

其次，拥有多种资源格式来满足个人偏好和不同情况也不失为一个好主意。

Second, it’s not a bad idea to have more than one resource format, to cover individual preferences and different situations.

最后，整个设计过程都是迭代的——这意味着我们不会假设一开始就得到 100% 正确的答案，但除非通过一系列连续的近似，否则永远无法获得正确的答案。这是一种思维模式的转变，我们不再幻想着让专家们聚在一起，让他们找到答案，但正是这种幻想导致了教育课程对学生不起作用。它不是迭代的，他们也没有参与其中。

Finally, this whole design process is iterative – which means we don’t assume we get the answer 100 per cent right at the outset, but that getting things right can never be achieved except by a series of successive approximations. This is something of a mindset shift from the fantasy of a world in which we just get the experts together and they figure it out, but it is this fantasy that has resulted in an educational curriculum that doesn’t work for students. It’s not iterative, and they weren’t involved.

在实践中，我们凭直觉判断哪种形式效果最好是一个很好的起点，特别是如果我们有一个多元化的设计团队，有观众代表的话：如果有人在学习舞蹈动作，视频可能效果最好。如果飞行员需要知道飞机起飞前该做什么，那么检查表是理想的选择——而乘客可能需要一种能让他们真正关心安全程序的形式。表演对话可能会从应该做什么和不应该做什么中受益，但由于这种能力的隐性性质，你可能希望在体验中练习这种东西。

In practice, our intuitive judgements about which formats work best are a pretty good starting point, especially if we have a diverse design group with audience representation: if someone is learning dance moves, a video may work best. If a pilot needs to know what to do before aircraft take-off, a checklist is ideal – while passengers may need a format that actually makes them care about safety procedures. Performance conversations might benefit from dos and don’ts, but because of the tacit nature of the capability it’s the kind of thing you might want to practise in an experience.

从内容到背景

From content to context

以这种方式设计学习计划的好处是它可以“优雅地降级”（或优雅地组合，取决于您的喜好）。一旦您决定了格式，您就可以指派不同的人来创建每个元素。这意味着开发是并行进行的，计划的某些部分比其他部分组合得更快。

The good thing about designing a learning programme in this way is that it ‘degrades gracefully’ (or comes together gracefully, depending on which you prefer). Once you have decided on formats, you can assign different people the task of creating each element. This means that development runs in parallel, with some parts of the programme coming together quicker than others.

这与传统的“课程设计”流程截然不同，在传统流程中，所有内容都需要编写脚本、制作故事板、签名和盖章，然后才能交付。在此过程中，我们开始快速向人们提供有用的资源，并在过程中添加更多元素。

This is quite different to the conventional ‘course design’ process where everything needs to be scripted, storyboarded, signed and sealed before it can be delivered. In this process, we start to get useful resources to people very quickly, adding more elements as we go.

这种方法也值得与学校或大学教育系统进行比较，目前这些教育系统的课程必须得到管理机构的批准。在这种模式下，我们将重点从内容转移到背景；转移到可展示的技能，而不管学习来自何处。想象一下一个没有课程的模式，只有一系列明确定义的跨多个不同领域的成就。

It’s also worth comparing this approach to the school or university education system, where currently the curricula have to be agreed by a governing body. In this model we shift the emphasis from content to context; to demonstrable skills, regardless of where the learning comes from. Imagine instead a model where there is no curriculum, just an array of clearly defined accomplishments across a number of different domains.

在典型的商业环境中，设计过程主要是确定正确的资源。这是因为你被赋予了一个需要解决的问题，而解决它主要包括帮助人们应对他们面临的挑战。然而，在教育环境中，人们会花更多的时间来考虑学习者应该应对的挑战。

In a typical business context the design process is predominantly about identifying the right resources. This is because you have been given a problem to solve, and solving it consists largely of helping people with the challenges they face. However, in an educational context, much more time would be spent considering the challenges that a learner should tackle.

每项挑战都应有与任务相匹配的资源。人们常常将其解释为“每一份文件可以想象，将一些相关资料放在一个地方就被认为是相关的”。有时，组织会错误地创建他们认为是资源的目录，但实际上它们只是将所有相关文档和材料聚集在一个地方。

Each of these challenges should be accompanied by resources matched to the task. Quite often, people interpret this to mean ‘every document that might conceivably be considered relevant dumped in a single place’. Sometimes organizations mistakenly create what they believe to be a catalogue of resources, but which are actually just all the related documents and materials gathered in one place.

同样，有些人认为这是策展——但这不是策展，也不是提供资源。资源是在特定情况下帮助你完成工作的最佳工具——它可能是一个人、一段视频或一份文件，但不是图书馆。

Equally, some people see this as curation – but this is not curation, neither is it providing resources. A resource is the best thing to help you get the job done in a specific situation – it might be a person, a video or a document, but it is not a library.

如果我们生产了一种我们称之为“资源”的东西，随后发现人们正在向其他地方寻求帮助，那么很有可能我们根本没有生产资源——我们只是创建了更多的内容，并以策展的名义把它堆成一堆。

If we produce something that we call a ‘resource’ and subsequently find that people are turning elsewhere for help, then there is a good chance we didn’t produce a resource at all – we just created more content, and heaped it into a pile in the name of curation.

这个例子再次说明了一个中心点：体验设计与教学设计完全不同。它不是内容倾倒；相反，重点是创造与现实世界相似的具有情感意义的情境。

This example once more illustrates a central point: experience design is nothing like instructional design. It is not content dumping; instead, the focus is on creating affectively significant situations that resemble those in the real world.

通过这种视角，不难想象其他领域的经验；例如，高级管理人员可能会遇到不满意的客户，以了解接受糟糕的客户服务的感受。

With this lens it isn’t hard to imagine experiences for other areas; senior executives might meet dissatisfied customers, for example, to understand how it feels to be on the receiving end of poor customer service.

4 开发

4 Develop

一旦你有了资源和经验的购物清单，就可以分配给个人或团队去开发。这个阶段最大的风险是教学设计思维会对产出产生负面影响；例如，制作冗长的讲座式影片或伪装成指南的操作程序页面。

Once you have a shopping list of resources and experiences, these can be assigned to individuals or teams to develop. The greatest risk at this stage is that instructional design thinking will influence the output negatively; for example, producing lengthy lecture-style films or pages of operating procedures disguised as guides.

有几件事可以减轻这种风险。首先，找有其他学科背景的人来制作你的内容。例如，营销专业人士通常对内容制作有更好的把握。从事体验设计工作的人会理解用户测试的重要性。参与者通常会很好地了解什么才是强大的体验。让观众参与进来将有助于避免偏离制作有用的资源和有影响力的体验太远。

There are a couple of things you can do to mitigate this risk. The first is to look to people who have a background in other disciplines to produce your content. Marketing professionals, for example, often have a better grasp of content production. People who have worked in experience design will understand the importance of user testing. Actors will usually have a good feel for what makes for a powerful experience. Involving members of the audience will help avoid straying too far from producing useful resources and impactful experiences.

问题并不在于给予观众他们想要的东西；相反，我们只有花时间了解人们需要什么，才能真正设计出有效的解决方案。

It is not a question of giving an audience what they want; rather, that we can only really design solutions that work if we take the time to understand what people need.

例如，刚开始新工作的人可能会说，他们希望有人在头几周里一直陪在他们身边为他们提供建议。虽然这可能不切实际，但你可以通过其他方式满足他们对建议和鼓励的需求。

For example, a person starting a new job might say they want someone to stand next to them to advise during the entirety of their first few weeks. While this might be impractical, you may be able to satisfy the need to have advice and encouragement on hand in other ways.

我们所开发事物的性质发生了这种转变，这对学校和大学教育有着重大影响，尽管“舞台上的圣人”模式并非独一无二，但已成为常态，尤其是在大学阶段。很难想象专业人士未来会扮演什么角色，他们在最坏的情况下也只不过是行走的百科全书。

This shift in the nature of the things that we develop has significant implications for school and university education, where the ‘sage on the stage’ model – while not exclusive – has been the norm, especially at university level. It is hard to see what future role there might be for professionals who are, at worst, little more than walking encyclopedias.

这意味着，如果你是一个学习和发展 (L&D) 专业人士（或对支持学习作为你的活动组合的一部分感兴趣的专业人士），你可能要考虑培养为未来做好准备的能力——你可能需要培养的技能各种资源和体验类型。能力可能包括：表演、讲故事、指导、绩效咨询、以人为本的设计、数字设计、心理学、营销、平面设计、电影、内容策略和原型设计。由于这是相当多样化的技能，您可以选择专注于资源创建或体验设计。

By implication, if you are a learning and development (L&D) professional (or a professional interested in supporting learning as part of your portfolio of activities), you might want to think about developing capabilities that will prepare you for the future – skills you might need to develop a range of resource and experience types. Capabilities might include: acting, storytelling, coaching, performance consulting, human-centred design, digital design, psychology, marketing, graphic design, film, content strategy and prototyping. Since this is quite a diverse range of skills, you might choose to specialize in either resource creation or experience design.

降低风险的第二种方法是使用模板或内容样本。例如，如果有人知道他们需要制作一份一页纸大小的清单，那么他们返回一份 40 页的、格式化为清单的标准操作程序的风险就会降低。

The second way to mitigate risk is to use templates or exemplars of content. If, for example, someone knows that they are expected to produce a checklist that fits on a single page, this reduces the risk that they will return a 40-page standard operating procedure formatted as if it were a checklist.

为了避免传统教育模式（如课堂和电子学习模块）的“引力”，图 8.3列出了需要考虑的其他模式。它并不详尽，但可能会提供一些提示。

To avoid the ‘gravitational pull’ of conventional educational formats, such as classroom and e-learning modules, Figure 8.3 shows a list of other formats to consider. It’s not exhaustive, but might provide some prompts.

5 部署

5 Deploy

部署是指您开始向人们提供资源或体验的那一刻。通常，最好以最小可行产品 (MVP) 为目标。MVP 描述了产品的基本要素——工作所需的最低限度。

Deploy describes the point at which you begin to make resources or experiences available to people. It is often best to aim for a minimum viable product (MVP). MVP describes the bare essentials of a product – the minimum that are required to work.

这种解决方案/产品开发方法在很多情况下都更好；这是一种谦逊的开发方法。我的意思是，我们不会假设我们的设计输出一定是正确的解决方案，事实上恰恰相反——我们假设会有错误和我们没有预料到的事情。

This approach to solution/product development is much better in many cases; it’s a humble approach to development. What I mean by that is that we don’t assume that the output of our design is necessarily the right solution, in fact the opposite – we assume that there will be errors and things that we didn’t anticipate.

通过部署试点或 MVP，我们可以快速判断解决方案的哪些部分有效、哪些部分无效，并将这些发现集成到产品的下一个版本中。

By deploying a pilot or MVP, we can quickly gauge which parts of our solution work and which don’t and integrate those findings into the next version of the product.

这种方法避免了您可能熟悉的自上而下的傲慢开发过程。这种传统流程始于“专家”设计解决方案，然后由重要人物进行一系列审核，直到最终（这确实需要很长时间）每个人都同意该解决方案是完美的，或者他们厌倦了审核它，此时它就会发布。

This approach avoids the more arrogant, top-down development process that you may be familiar with. This kind of conventional process begins with ‘experts’ who design a solution which then goes through a series of reviews by Important People until, eventually (and it does take a long time), everyone is either agreed that the solution is perfect or they are fed up with reviewing it, at which point it is launched.

在几乎所有情况下，都会立即发现解决方案并不完美，并且某些事情被忽略了，但现在不可能采取任何措施，因为 1）项目计划指定了最终版本，并且 2）修改它意味着专家和重要人物弄错了。

In almost every case it immediately becomes apparent that the solution is not perfect, and that certain things were overlooked, but it is now impossible to do anything about it since 1) the project plan specified a final version, and 2) revising it would imply that the experts and Important People got it wrong.

因此，MVP 部署方法通常要好得多，因为人们可以更快地看到结果，你不太可能浪费金钱，而且你可以根据对产品的反应继续修改产品。这种方法还可以避免人们在“最终版本”截止日期前工作时遇到的大部分压力：解决方案的某些元素不可避免地不会像你希望的那样快速交付，但你仍然可以部署现有的内容。

So an MVP approach to deployment is generally much better, since people see results much quicker, you’re less likely to waste money and you can continue to revise the product in line with the reaction to it. This approach also avoids much of the stress that people experience when working to a ‘final version’ deadline: invariably some of the elements of a solution won’t be delivered quite as quickly as you hoped, but you can still deploy what you have.

部署解决方案还涉及让人们意识到它的存在。设计出一些美妙的东西，然后把它埋在地下室厕所的文件柜里，上面写着“小心豹子”的标志，这是没有意义的。

Deploying a solution also involves making people aware that it is there. It’s no good designing something wonderful, then burying it in a filing cabinet in a basement lavatory bearing the sign ‘Beware of the leopard’.

就像现在的许多事情一样，你需要营销它们——并且以一种为受众量身定制的方式进行营销。例如，总部可能通过电子邮件更新传达所有信息，但你的受众可能会通过共用厨房的布告栏来跟踪正在发生的事情。同样，了解你的受众将有助于你成功提高知名度。资源不能只是“有用的东西”——它必须是“随时可用的有用的东西”（例如，谷歌就是这样的）。

Like many things these days, you need to market them – and to market them in a way that is designed with the audience in mind. For example, Head Office may communicate everything via email updates, but your audience may keep track of what is happening via a noticeboard in a shared kitchen. Again, finding out about your audience will help you succeed in raising awareness. A resource cannot simply be ‘useful stuff’ – it has to be ‘useful stuff immediately to hand’ (in the way that Google is, for example).

总体而言，您应该考虑以敏感的方式部署解决方案，以适应其使用环境。要取得成功，您的解决方案必须是在给定环境中最容易实现的。这通常意味着了解人们今天如何完成工作，并与他们的期望相结合，而不是期望他们满足您的期望。

Overall, you should look to deploy a solution in a way that is sensitive to the context in which it will be used. To be successful, your solution has to be the easiest thing to do in a given context. This often means understanding how people get stuff done today, and integrating with their expectations rather than expecting them to meet yours.

使用技术

Use of technology

最后一点是传统“自上而下”思维的另一个例子，它一次又一次地出现。本质上，教育机构假设您将按照所要求的方式使用所要求的任何技术。

This last point is yet another example of conventional ‘top-down’ thinking and it crops up time and time again. In essence, the educational organization makes the assumption that you will use whatever technologies you are told to use, in the way that you are told to use them.

曾经有一段时间，组织能够在一定程度上强制员工的行为；那时人们使用的唯一技术就是他们在工作中必须使用的技术。但组织似乎不明白时代已经变了，现在人们拥有并带到工作或教育中的技术（如智能手机）通常比组织提供给他们的技术更先进。

There was an era where they were able to enforce behaviour to some extent; a time when the only technology that people used was the technology they were required to use at work. But organizations don’t seem to understand that times have changed, and that now the technology that people own and bring to work or education (such as smartphones) is often superior to that which they are presented with by their organization.

因此，他们会像任何明智的人一样，找出最有效的方法来完成工作。这意味着，例如，人们会优先使用 Dropbox 和 Google Drive 等系统，而不是 SharePoint 等笨重且设计不佳的系统。他们会忽略 Yammer更喜欢 WhatsApp，并认为通过学习管理系统的“社交学习社区”进行学习的想法很可笑。

As a result, they do what any sensible person would do and figure out the most efficient way to get the job done. This means, for example, that people will use systems such as Dropbox and Google Drive in preference to clunky and poorly designed systems such as SharePoint. They will ignore Yammer in preference for WhatsApp, and find the idea that they should learn via the learning management system’s ‘social learning community’ laughable.

简而言之，您的部署方法不应假设您的用户必须采用新的工作方式，或在自己的设备上安装某些新技术。如今，大约 80% 在大型组织工作的人只是为了完成合规培训才访问他们的学习管理系统。

Put simply, your approach to deployment should not presume that your users have to adopt a new way of working, or install some new technology on their own device. Today, around 80 per cent of people who work in big organizations have only visited their learning management system in order to complete compliance training.

作为一名学习专业人士，你可以自欺欺人地认为，通过创建课件并将其放在学习管理系统中，你正在为组织学习做出贡献——但我可以向你保证，你不会的。你可以保持沉默，假装你正在做一些与学习有关的事情——你不会孤单——或者你可以假设人们将使用的学习技术是他们选择在个人生活中使用的技术，然后从那里开始^。4

As a learning professional, you can kid yourself that you are contributing to organizational learning by creating courseware and putting it on the learning management system – but I can assure you, you are not. You can keep quiet and pretend that you are doing something to do with learning – you won’t be alone – or you can assume that the learning technology that people will use is the technology they choose to use in their personal lives, and start there.⁴

最后，提醒一下，最好的资源不一定是数字资源，最好的体验也不一定就是实体资源。数字环境可以提供无法在实体环境中创造的探索机会，有时最好的资源是印在纸上的东西，或者是一个可以交谈的人。你的目标是成为日常生活的一部分，而不是一年一次。

Finally, a reminder that the best resource is not necessarily a digital one nor the best experience a physical one. Digital environments can provide opportunities for exploration that would not be possible to create physically, and sometimes the best resource is something printed on a piece of paper – or a person to talk to. Your goal is to be part of the everyday, not the once-a-year.

6 迭代

6 Iterate

部署 MVP 后，您可以跟踪使用情况，征求受众的反馈并继续改进产品。通常，反馈可分为小改动和大改动，您可以选择定期实施这些改动 - 例如，每月进行小改动，每六个月进行大改动。

Once you have deployed an MVP, you track usage, seek feedback from your audience and continue to improve the product. Typically, feedback can be grouped into minor and major changes, which you may choose to implement on a periodical basis – for example, making minor changes on a monthly basis and major changes every six months.

如今，教学设计师的传统角色几乎已经难以辨认，而更像是产品经理。传统的教学设计从知识体系（例如，一项新政策）开始，教学设计师将其转换为最终的课程格式（通过一系列评审），然后部署，让教学设计师自由地继续进行下一个项目。

By now the conventional role of an instructional designer is barely recognizable and has become something more like a product manager. Traditional instructional design starts with a body of knowledge (for example, a new policy) which is converted by the instructional designer into a final course format (via a series of reviews) which is then deployed, leaving the instructional designer free to move on to the next project.

部署的课程通常在开始时存在缺陷，但会一直保留，直到每个人都同意它已经完全过时并需要修改 - 然后会由不同的教学设计师负责重新设计。

The deployed course often has shortcomings at the outset, but will remain in place until everyone agrees that it is hopelessly out of date and needs to be revised – whereupon a different instructional designer will be tasked with the redesign.

在新世界中，学习专业人士通常关注一项或一系列挑战以及应对这些挑战的人——例如新加入者或新领导者。作为产品经理，他们仍要对解决方案在一段时间内不断发展的各个方面负责——例如维护内容策略、营销策略和功能改进。他们还可能负责解决方案的体验和性能支持维度，确保两者发挥互补作用。

In the new world, a learning professional is typically concerned with a challenge or set of challenges and with the people tackling it – for example, new joiners or new leaders. As product managers they remain accountable for all aspects of a solution as it evolves over a period of time – for example maintaining the content strategy, the marketing strategy and the functional improvements. They may also be responsible for both the experiential and performance-support dimensions of a solution, ensuring that the two things play complementary roles.

产品经理通过消费者反馈来指导持续的课程调整过程。因此，如果学习专业人士想要在组织内发挥有效作用，提高绩效和员工体验，他们需要掌握更广泛的技能。

The product manager guides a process of continual course correction through consumer feedback. For this reason, learning professionals will need a broader set of skills if they are to be able to play a useful role in improving performance and employee experience within organizations.

体验设计

Experience design

现在您已经了解了 5Di 流程，您可能会发现有些事情已经很明显了：当每个人都知道自己想要做什么时，它会运行良好，但如果他们不知道，它就不会运行得很好。

Now that you understand the 5Di process, something may have become apparent to you: it works well where everyone knows what they want to do, not so well where they don’t.

例如，如果你知道人们将成为领导者、销售人员或健康顾问，那么这个过程就很有效。你可以开发经验和资源，将人们担心的事情与每个人都希望的结果联系起来。

If, for example, you know that people are going to be leaders, or salespeople, or health advisers – this process works fine. You can develop experiences and resources which together link the things that people are worried about with the outcome everyone is hoping for.

5Di 是一种很好的方法，可以识别支持学习的资源以及可能需要体验的领域（尽管它不会告诉您如何设计这种体验）。换句话说，它在频谱的“拉动”端效果最好。

The 5Di is a good way to identify resources that will support learning, and areas where an experience might be needed (though it won’t tell you exactly how to design that experience). In other words, it works best at the ‘pull’ end of the spectrum.

但在某些情况下，你没有这种清晰度：两个明显的例子是早期教育（大多数孩子还不知道他们想做什么）和没有人知道如何做好某件事的情况。后者的一个例子可能是向组织引入一套新技术——由于我们还不知道使用新技术的最佳方式，因此很难提前建立人们所需的资源。另一个例子可能是组织转型，其中未来状态尚未明确定义。

But in some situations you don’t have this kind of clarity: two obvious examples being in early years education (where most children don’t yet know what they want to be) and situations where nobody yet knows how to do something well. An example of the latter might be the introduction of a new set of technologies to an organization – since we don’t yet know the best ways to work with the new technology, it’s very hard to build the resources that people will need in advance. Another example might be an organizational transformation, where the future state is not yet well defined.

在这些情况下，重点转移到体验设计上。

In these cases, the focus shifts to experience design.

良好的体验设计应该在情感上与现实生活环境相似。无论我们谈论的是模拟还是故事，都是如此。在进行体验设计时，目标是确定关键挑战和人们必须做出的情感转变。以飞行员为例，这些转变可能是：起飞、降落和发动机故障或强侧风等严重问题。

A good experience design should affectively resemble the real-life context. This is true whether we are talking about a simulation or a story. In undertaking experience design, the goal is to identify the key challenges and affective shifts that people are required to make. In the case of a pilot, for example, these might be: take-off, landing and critical problems such as engine failure or heavy cross-winds.

如果我们将其视为其他类型的挑战或角色的类比，那么这将很有帮助：企业转向精益方法和数字产品系列的关键挑战是什么？这些挑战可能是：了解新型消费者、组织重新设计、招聘合适的员工、决定最佳的上市方法、公共关系和客户关怀。通过将这些内容重新创建为情感上（而不是信息层面）类似于现实生活的模拟，我们可以为学习创造条件。

If we think of this as an analogy for other types of challenges or roles it is helpful: what are the critical challenges for a business shifting to a lean approach, and a digital product range? These might be: understanding a new type of consumer, organizational redesign, recruiting the right employee, deciding on the best go-to-market approach, public relations and customer care. By re-creating each of these as simulations that resemble real life affectively (rather than at an informational level), we can create the conditions for learning to occur.

另一个很好的例子可能是训练即将部署到中东冲突地区的士兵。考虑到复杂的文化敏感性，他们可能面临的一个关键挑战是如何缓和与当地平民的冲突。人们很容易想象出一个数字解决方案——例如一个卡通风格的场景，其中包含多项选择的对话选项。

Another good example might be training soldiers due to deploy to a Middle-East conflict zone. A critical challenge they might face is de-escalation of confrontations with local civilians, given complex cultural sensitivities. One could easily imagine a digital solution – for example a cartoon-style scenario, with multiple-choice conversational options.

这种传统方法的问题在于，虽然它可以传达商定的“学习目标”，但它在情感上并不类似于现实生活：坐在空调办公室里悠闲地点击一系列电脑屏幕与在充满敌意的环境中穿着全身盔甲站在 120 度的高温下，而某人离你几英寸远的地方用外语辱骂你，在情感层面上是截然不同的。

The problem with this conventional approach is that while it may convey the agreed ‘learning objectives’, it doesn’t affectively resemble real life: sitting in an air-conditioned office leisurely clicking your way through a series of computer screens is dramatically different at an affective level from standing in full body armour in 120-degree heat in a hostile environment as someone inches from your face hurls abuse in a foreign language.

如果你目前在学校或大学教育领域工作，那么本章的内容可能会让你觉得非常奇怪和陌生：你的世界更可能涉及课程、教学计划和教科书。但请停下来想象一下未来的世界，一个学习和现实世界融合在一起的世界，例如，一个想成为宇航员的人可以体验一点宇航员的生活，并面临宇航员面临的一些挑战。你会如何设计这样的世界？

If you are currently working in school or university education, this chapter has probably struck you as quite odd and alien: your world is more likely about curricula, lesson plans and textbooks. But pause to imagine for a minute a future world, a world in which learning and the real world are blended so that, for example, a person who wants to become an astronaut gets to experience a little of what that might be like, and is presented with some of the challenges that astronauts face. How would you design for that kind of world?

您可以做一些可怕的事情，即制定一整套课程，其中包含您认为宇航员可能需要了解的主题 - 或者，您可以与已经成为宇航员的人交谈，让他们以上述方式记录他们的担忧，任务和挑战。

You could do something terrible, namely, develop an entire curriculum containing topics you think it might be handy for an astronaut to know – or, you could talk to people who have become astronauts and get them to catalogue their concerns, tasks and challenges in the ways described above.

在与他们交谈时，你要避免陷入定义主题和能力的陷阱。相反，你要讲故事——关于人们面临的挑战和感受的故事。你要尽可能详细地描绘出每项重要任务的情感背景，因为你的工作就是重现它。

In talking to them, you’d want to avoid the trap of defining topics and capabilities. Instead you’d want stories – stories about the challenges people faced and how they felt. You would want the affective context for each significant task to be mapped in as much detail as possible, since it would be your job to recreate it.

你如何评价学习？

How do you evaluate learning?

如果你从错误的假设开始，你永远无法得出正确的结论。因为多年来人们一直认为教育是人们在头脑中储存知识的过程，而且企业学习和发展在方法上模仿学校，所以学习评估以测试人们的知识为中心。

If you start with incorrect assumptions, you will never reach correct conclusions. Because for many years people have thought of education as a process by which people store knowledge in their heads, and because corporate learning and development have mimicked school in their approach, learning evaluation has centred on tests of what people know.

但是，如果我们接受学习的新定义，即学习是由于记忆而导致的行为或能力的改变，那么显然我们应该做的是衡量人们可以做的事情，以及他们对这些事情的态度。

But if we accept our new definition of learning, in which learning is a change in behaviour or capability as a result of memory, then it looks obvious that what we should do is measure the things people can do, and their attitudes towards doing them.

这看似简单，但其中却存在一些复杂因素。总体而言，组织对学习本身并不感兴趣。他们感兴趣的是业务成果，并广泛接受了学习可以提高绩效的前提，但对学习活动能为组织带来的价值却越来越怀疑。

This seems simple, but there are several complications. Organizations, by and large, are not interested in learning per se. They are interested in business results, and have broadly accepted the premise that learning can contribute to performance, but are growing increasingly sceptical about the value that learning activity can bring to the organization.

这是由多种因素造成的，特别是有研究表明，绝大多数员工的学习并非发生在学习与发展部门组织的活动期间（无论是课堂学习还是数字化学习），而且这些团队也难以找到令人信服的证据来证明他们的活动正在发挥作用。

This is a consequence of a number of contributing factors – in particular, research that suggests that the vast majority of employee learning does not take place during the organized activities that L&D departments run (whether classroom-based or digital), and the difficulty which those same teams have had in coming up with much compelling evidence that their activities are making a difference.

在此背景下，L&D 部门的持续存在令人瞩目，但通常可以归因于两点。首先，许多受监管行业需要依法证明其已按照法律要求提供培训。这意味着培训的目的是将违反政策的责任从管理团队转移到员工身上。换句话说，合规培训保护了高管（和学习团队）。

The continued existence of L&D departments against this backdrop is remarkable, but can often be attributed to two things. First, many regulated industries are required by law to demonstrate that they have provided training in accordance with legal requirements. This means that training serves the purpose of shifting accountability for policy breaches from the management team to the employee. In other words, compliance training shields the executive (and the learning team).

其次，参加培训活动的人通常都乐在其中。通常在实体场所举行的培训活动包括休息、与他人见面和聊天、用餐以及娱乐或自我​​反思。虽然这些方面不太可能直接影响绩效，但它们令人愉快，并让人感觉到自己受到组织的重视。

Second, those people who attend training events generally enjoy them. Usually a training event held in a physical location involves a break from work, an opportunity to meet and chat with other people, meals, and an element of fun or self-reflection. While it is unlikely that any of these aspects will directly impact performance, they are enjoyable and give a person the sense that they are valued by the organization.

经理们通常都明白这一点，当他们每年必须与团队成员坐下来讨论发展问题一两次时，他们会将“培训”视为给个人一点鼓励的机会。在这种情况下，培训是一种杠杆，类似于酌情奖金。

Managers generally understand this, and when, once or twice a year, they are obliged to sit down with their team members to discuss their development, they see ‘training’ as an opportunity to give individuals a bit of a boost. In this context, training is a lever to pull, along the lines of discretionary bonuses.

您可能觉得很奇怪，组织不采取简单的措施，即通过绩效衡量来衡量培训对绩效的影响。这里有三件事值得牢记。

It may strike you as strange that organizations do not take the simple step of measuring the impact of training on performance, by measuring performance. There are three things worth bearing in mind here.

首先，如今许多组织没有能力衡量绩效，甚至无法定义绩效是什么。这方面也有明显的例外——例如在销售环境和呼叫中心，但除非你有详细的行为衡量标准，否则评估影响是非常困难的。相反，他们会看企业是否赚钱，然后推断其余的。大多数组织都会进行年度绩效评估，这比其他任何事情都更能说明直线经理和团队之间关系的质量。

First, today many organizations do not have the ability to measure performance nor even to define what it is. There are notable exceptions to this – for example in sales environments and call centres, but unless you have detailed measures of behaviour, assessing impact is very difficult. Instead, they will look at whether the business is making money and infer the rest. Most organizations run an annual performance review, which tells you more about the quality of the relationship between line manager and team than it does anything else.

其次，组织不是科学意义上的受控环境。简单的实验设计（其中一组接受培训而另一组不接受培训）很少发生，因为培训交付受其他优先事项的驱动，并且还有许多其他变量影响绩效。

Second, organizations are not controlled environments in the scientific sense. A simple experimental design, in which one group receives training and the other does not, rarely happens, since training delivery is driven by other priorities and a whole host of other variables are affecting performance.

最后，也是最重要的一点，如果每个人都认为学习主要是保留知识，而知识会影响绩效，那么普遍的期望是 L&D 团队将使用测验来评估培训的有效性。虽然许多 L&D 团队确实这样做了，但这并没有解决记忆信息不太可能影响行为的问题。

Finally, and most importantly, if everyone believes that learning is largely about retaining knowledge, and that knowledge affects performance, then the general expectation is that the L&D team will use a quiz to assess the effectiveness of the training. Though many L&D teams do exactly this, it doesn’t address the problem that memorizing information is unlikely to influence behaviour.

许多学习评估模型基本上掩盖了这个问题。柯克帕特里克四级模型方便地提供了与行为变化无关的学习评估指标，允许 L&D 继续掩盖缺乏任何绩效改进，同时为进一步的内容倾销提供理由。在提出的四个级别（反应、学习、行为、结果）中，只有 3 级和 4 级是有意义的学习指标，而 2 级“学习”不是学习而是记忆。

Many models for learning evaluation essentially whitewash this problem. The Kirkpatrick four-level model conveniently provides measures of learning evaluation that do not relate to behavioural change, allowing L&Ds to continue to obscure the lack of any performance improvement while simultaneously justifying further content dumping. Of the four levels presented (reaction, learning, behaviour, results), only levels 3 and 4 are meaningful measures of learning, and level 2 ‘learning’ is not learning but memorization.

换句话说，我可以记住大量信息，而不会以任何有意义的方式影响我的行为或能力（您可能还记得，这是我们对学习的定义）。想象一个只有“行为”和“结果”的学习评估模型，你的框架就开始显得相当单薄了。

To put it another way, I can memorize a great deal of information without it affecting my behaviour or capability in any meaningful way (which, you may recall, is our definition of learning). Picture a model of learning evaluation with only ‘behaviour’ and ‘results’, and your framework is starting to look pretty thin.

如果相关组织没有准确的行为和结果衡量标准，那么一种选择是让 L&D 团队来解决这个问题——但这通常会陷入困境，因为实际衡量行为往往比提供培训本身更具挑战性，而且成本更高。因此，人们会尝试通过自我报告问题来做到这一点：“培训是否改变了你的行为？”

If the organization in question does not have accurate measures of behaviour and results, one option would be for the L&D team to tackle this – but this generally gets mired in problems since actually measuring behaviour is often a more significant and costly challenge than delivering the training itself. As a result, there is a token attempt to do this with self-report questions: ‘Did the training alter your behaviour?’

这样做的结果就形成了一种心照不宣的协议，员工会根据自己在培训活动中的享受程度给予培训团队积极的评价。

The consequence of this is a sort of tacit deal in which employees give the training team positive evaluations depending on how much they enjoyed themselves at the event.

学习评估的四种方法

Four approaches to learning evaluation

我遇到了四种更好的方法来解决评估学习的问题。无论如何，首先要说的是，在项目的“定义”阶段，重要的是从一开始就定义可衡量、可观察的行为。

I have come across four better ways to tackle the problem of evaluating learning. The first thing to say, in any case, is that in the ‘define’ stage of a project, it is important to define measurable, observable behaviours at the outset.

如果有人委托你开发“创新”培训课程或“卓越领导力”培训课程，你完全可以根据在互联网上找到的内容整理出一些内容，并以生动活泼的方式进行讲授，从而获得良好的“1 级和 2 级”评价。但你将完全不知道这门课程可能产生的影响。

If someone tasks you with developing an ‘innovation’ training course or an ‘excellent leadership’ training course, it is perfectly possible to pull something together based on content you can find on the internet and deliver it in a lively way that gets good ‘level 1 and 2’ evaluations. But you will be left entirely in the dark as to the likely impact this course will have.

除非你真的商定了一份你希望看到不同情况发生的清单，否则你不应该开始工作。在行为受到密切监控的环境中，具体行为可能是：平均通话时间显著减少、客户满意度分数提高、销售额增加 15%。

Unless you have actually agreed a list of things that you would expect to see happening differently, you shouldn’t start work. In environments where behaviour is closely monitored, specific behaviours might be: a significant reduction in average call times, an increase in customer satisfaction scores, a 15 per cent increase in sales.

第二个要点是，实现这些结果通常不需要学习，而是需要开发资源和指导，使人们能够达到更高的标准。同样，地铁地图的类比在这里很有用：如果你想减少我穿越伦敦的平均旅行时间，你可以花时间和金钱强迫我记住伦敦地铁系统——或者你可以给我一张方便的地图，减少我学习这些东西的需要。

The second general point to make is that most often achieving these outcomes will not involve learning, but rather developing the resources and guidance that will enable people to perform to a higher standard. Again, the Underground map analogy is useful here: if you want to reduce my average travel time across London, you could spend time and money forcing me to memorize the London subway system – or you could just give me a handy map that reduces my need to learn these things.

最后一点很重要，因为如果你相信“2 级”结果的想法，那么矛盾的是，这实际上可能会阻止你创造任何对行为产生实际影响的事物。

This last point is important, since if you are sold on the idea of ‘level 2’ outcomes, then, paradoxically, this may actually prevent you from creating anything that makes an actual difference to behaviour.

实际衡量绩效

Actually measure performance

评估的第一个方法是直面问题。几年前，FitBit 和类似的可穿戴设备非常受欢迎，可以跟踪你的日常活动，我的团队对此印象深刻，想知道我们是否可以对领导力做同样的事情。所以我们就这么做了。

The first approach to evaluation involves tackling the problem head-on. Some years ago, impressed by the popularity of FitBit and similar wearable devices that track your activity on a daily basis, my team wondered if we could do the same for leadership. So we did.

最终，它变成了一款应用程序，而不是一款手环，但它可以定期更新你的总体得分，并详细分析导致得分的因素。

In the end it turned out to be an app rather than a bracelet, but one which gave you a regular update on your overall score and a detailed breakdown of what had contributed to that.

我们首先要弄清楚的是：优秀的领导力会带来什么？我们的结论是，最好的选择是团队参与度。有效的领导者会推动团队参与度，进而影响自由裁量努力和生产力。还有一套成熟的行为有助于提高参与度，这些行为可以使用盖洛普 Q12 指数进行衡量——12 个问题都是可靠的指标。

The first thing we had to figure out was: what is the product of good leadership? Our conclusion was that the best bet would be team engagement. Effective leaders drive team engagement, which in turn influences discretionary effort and productivity. There is also a well-established set of behaviours that contribute to engagement, and these are measured using the Gallup Q12 index – 12 questions that are reliable indicators.

注册使用该应用的领导者可以设置一个时间段（例如一周），让应用自动就这些问题对他们的团队进行调查，然后返回总体得分、详细趋势数据以及与平均值的比较。最后，我们能够使用这些数据为资源提供个性化推荐。

Leaders signing up to use the app could set a time period (say, a week) for the app to auto-poll their team on these questions, which in turn returned an overall score, detailed trend data and a comparison with the average. Finally, we were able to use this data to make personalized recommendations for resources.

我的观点是，虽然明确说明你希望通过你的课程实现的结果对你来说可能并不是什么新鲜事，但技术可以为我们提供衡量（和推动）行为变化的新机会。我们不需要拿着剪贴板站在学习者面前。我们的许多受众在做事时已经产生了大量数字数据。在数据安全和隐私限制的约束下，这可以为我们了解他们的行为提供一个新窗口。

My point is that, while the idea of being really clear about the outcomes you expect to achieve as a result of your programme will probably not come as news to you, technology can provide us with new opportunities to measure (and drive) behavioural change. We don’t need to be standing over learners with a clipboard. Many of our audience are already generating significant amounts of digital data as they go about their business. Working within data security and privacy constraints, this can give us a new window into their behaviour.

与你的学习者交谈

Talk to your learners

第二种学习评估方法是我们最常用的方法。我将其称为 Brinkerhoff 方法，但主要是因为我知道在 L&D 中，人们本能地偏爱任何听起来很学术的东西。Brinkerhoff 的案例研究方法包括查看课程中最成功和最不成功的案例并进行详细研究^。5

The second approach to learning evaluation is the one we most commonly use. I describe it as the Brinkerhoff Approach, but mainly only because I know that within L&D there is an instinctive preference for anything that sounds academic. Brinkerhoff’s case study approach involves looking at the most and least successful cases within your programme and studying them in detail.⁵

事实上，我们倾向于采取一种更符合上述以人为本的设计方法的变体：我们与人交谈。当我们开发一个项目时，我们会召集目标受众（我们旨在支持的人）的代表群体，本质上，我们会问：“你在努力解决什么问题？”

In fact, what we tend to do is a variation on this that is more consistent with the human-centred design approach outlined above: we talk to people. When we are developing a programme we get a representative group of our target audience (the people we are aiming to support) together and, in essence, we ask: ‘What are you struggling with?’

然后，我们离开并拿出我们认为会有所作为的资源和经验（并且经常让他们参与这个过程），然后我们启动试点并看看会发生什么。

We then go away and come up with resources – and experiences – that we believe will make a difference (and often involve them in this process), and then we launch a pilot and see what happens.

我从未采用过这种方法，也没有让我们的飞行员大量超额认购（在某些情况下甚至高达 4,000%），从而产生健康的活动数据。使用这些数据，你可以回到你的观众群，本质上是说：“我们可以看到你正在使用这些东西——它们对你的日常工作有什么影响？”以及“哪些东西不太有用，或者缺失了？”这会生成一个非常丰富的具体好处和引言列表。

I have never followed this approach and not had our pilots massively oversubscribed (in some cases by as much as 4,000 per cent), which in turn results in healthy activity data. Using this data you are able to return to your audience group and, in essence, say: ‘We can see that you are using these things – how are they impacting your day-to-day work?’ as well as ‘Which things are not so useful, or missing?’ This generates a really rich list of specific benefits and quotes.

确实，这种方法无法像进行实验那样建立因果关系。您可能还想知道这比柯氏 1 级和 2 级数据好在哪里，因为这些信息是基于自我报告的。

It’s true that this approach does not establish a causal relationship in the way that, say, running an experiment might. You might also wonder how this is better than Kirkpatrick level 1 and 2 data, since the information is based on self-reports.

对此，我会回答说，你得到的信息是不同的；由于绩效支持旨在解决人们面临的具体挑战，因此你会得到非常精确的描述，说明如何使用资源来改变绩效，并以活动数据为后盾。当人们大量订阅一个系统时，我们很少质疑它的实用性——例如，我没有看到关于电子邮件投资回报率 (ROI) 的报告。

To that I would respond that the information you get is of a different order; since performance support is designed to address specific challenges that people face, you get very precise descriptions of how resources are being used to shift performance, backed up with activity data. Where people overwhelmingly subscribe to a system, we rarely question its usefulness – I see no reports on the return on investment (ROI) of email, for example.

同样，如果我站在一群人面前，他们想让我解释某个项目的投资回报率，那么健康（和选修）使用数据，以及员工自己提供的关于该项目如何帮助他们更好地完成工作的逐字报告，要比一些课程评估数据、测验分数和对绩效的模糊暗示要好得多。

Equally, if I am standing in front of a group of people who want me to explain the ROI for a programme, a combination of healthy (and elective) usage data, combined with verbatim reports from employees themselves on how the programme is helping them to do their job better, is a far better position than some course evaluation data, quiz scores and vague insinuations towards performance.

给学习者提供实际的工作

Give learners real work to do

第三，我发现一种非常有效的方法是基于项目的学习。例如，一个希望推动创新文化的组织。你可以把人们带到教室里，和他们谈论创新，向他们介绍流程，并分享一些案例研究——但这可能没有什么效果。为什么不给他们一个挑战呢？

Third, an approach that I have seen work very well is project-based learning. Take, for example, an organization that wishes to drive a culture of innovation. You could put people in a classroom and talk to them about innovation, introduce them to processes, and share a few case studies – but this would likely have no impact. Why not set them a challenge?

一般来说，学习是由挑战驱动的——无论是我们面临的挑战还是我们被给予的挑战。在这个例子中，我们创建了一个持续数月的项目，参与者必须在他们自己的创新项目中使用我们提供的方法。他们与团队合作，众包创新想法，通过同行评审过程验证这些想法，利用一些种子资金将这些想法开发成原型，然后向高管们的“龙穴”展示。

In general, learning is driven by challenges – either the ones we have or the ones we are given. In this example, we created a programme that lasted several months, where participants had to use the methodologies that we gave them on an innovation project of their own. They worked with their teams to crowdsource ideas for innovation, they proved these ideas through a peer-review process, they developed those ideas to prototype using some seed funding, then presented to a ‘Dragons’ Den’ of senior executives.

我们在这里的角色不是推销内容，而是给予人们实验的许可。团队和个人可能有很多好主意，但他们并不觉得他们的组织允许他们进行测试。他们不被允许尝试。

Our role here is less about pushing content, and more about giving people licence to experiment. Teams and individuals who may well have bright ideas do not feel that their organization gives them licence to put them to the test. They are not allowed to play.

通过创建一个“安全空间”——我指的是一个可以安全地尝试不同的事情并且失败的环境——我们让人们能够学习。

By creating a ‘safe space’ – by which I mean a context in which it is reputationally safe to try something different, and fail – we enable people to learn.

在大多数情况下，这类基于项目的学习课程会产生一些想法，从而带来实际的改进，例如效率或销售方面的改进，这些改进可以用现有的业务指标来评估。课程带来的回报或节省往往远远超过课程的总成本。

In most cases, these kinds of project-based learning programmes generate ideas that lead to actual improvements, for example in efficiency or sales, that can be assessed using existing business measures. Oftentimes programmes realize returns or savings that greatly outweigh the total cost of the programme.

在这些情况下，我发现，当人们问起这些项目的“回报”时，他们根本不关心人们能记住什么——他们很满意听到这对底线产生了实质性的影响。通常看起来，只有 L&D 团队在为“学习”而烦恼。

In these cases, I have found it notable that when people ask about the ‘returns’ on such programmes, they are not remotely interested in what people were able to memorize – they are quite satisfied to hear that it made a substantial difference to the bottom line. It often seems as if it is just the L&D team who are fretting over ‘learning’.

奖励徽章

Award badges

评估的最后一个例子建立在基于项目的学习之上，并且可能更多地反映出学习的未来，因为学习和工作开始融合：徽章。

The last example of evaluation builds on project-based learning and probably speaks more to the future of learning, as learning and work begin to merge: badges.

如果你遇到一个在军队服役多年的人，而且他们穿着军装，你经常会注意到他们胸前挂着一排勋章。据我所知，很少有勋章是因坐在教室里或记住信息而颁发的。一般来说，勋章反映了成就。

If you meet someone who has spent many years in the military, and they are in military dress, you will often notice a ribbon of medals across their chest. So far as I know, there aren’t many medals handed out for sitting in classrooms, or for memorizing information. In general, medals reflect accomplishments.

这是一种很好的方法，因为这意味着，当你与某人交谈时，你对他们的能力有了一个大致的了解。你知道他们做过什么。我对那些把自己的成就挂在胸前的人的印象远比那些把自己的课程证书挂在小隔间里的人更深刻。

This is a good approach because it means, when you are talking to someone, that you have a fair idea of their capabilities. You know what they have done. I am far more impressed by someone who has their accomplishments pinned to their chest than I am by someone who has their course certificates pinned to their cubicle.

几乎可以肯定的是，未来的评估将包括创建一个徽章生态系统，以反映我们在各个学科领域的成就。作为学习专业人士，我们将负责设置人们可以通过哪些挑战获得这些徽章，以及人们在追求这些徽章时需要的资源。

Almost certainly, the future of evaluation will consist of creating an ecosystem of badges that reflect our accomplishments across a wide range of disciplines. As learning professionals, we will be responsible for setting up the challenges via which people can earn these badges, and the resources that people will need in pursuit of them.

如果您熟悉电脑游戏，那么这个系统听起来应该很熟悉。每个电脑游戏都有大量可能完成的成就（例如，完成任务而不造成任何人死亡），当您成功完成任务时，您会积累奖杯。这些奖杯会添加到您的玩家资料中。

If you are familiar with computer games, the system will sound familiar. Each computer game has a large library of possible accomplishments (e.g. completing a mission without getting anyone killed), and as you successfully complete the missions you accumulate trophies. These are added to your gamer profile.

这意味着，当你查看玩家资料时，你可以立即看到他们已经掌握了哪些类型的游戏，哪些游戏他们仍是新手，以及他们在每种游戏中的成就。如果你正在为在线团队选择团队成员，这些将让你对选择谁有一个很好的想法。现在想象一下学习/工作中的类似情况。

This means that when you are looking at a gamer profile you can instantly see what sorts of games they have mastered, and where they are still novices, and precisely how accomplished they are in each. If you were choosing team members for an online team, these would give you an excellent idea of whom to pick. Now imagine something like this for learning/work.

组织将根据人们拥有的徽章数量来选择支付报酬，并使用自动选择流程来确定合适的徽章资料。同样，个人选择应对挑战也将基于他们可能获得的徽章。如果您的组织没有提供足够的徽章（传统意义上的“学习机会”），那么您将一事无成。

Organizations will choose to pay people for work, based on the badges they possess, using automatic selection processes to identify a suitable badge profile. Equally, an individual’s choice to work on a challenge will be based on the badges that they may earn. If you are an organization that doesn’t offer sufficient badges (‘learning opportunities’ in conventional terms), you will be dead in the water.

良好的设计模式应适用于各种情况。近年来，工作性质、劳动力和工作场所发生了一些重大变化。

A good design model should work in every context. Recent years have seen some dramatic shifts in the nature of work, the workforce and the workplace.

在下一章中，我们将探讨这对学习和发展意味着什么。

In the next chapter we will take a look at what that means for learning and development.

本章探讨了通过应用特定流程来改进学习计划的设计和性质的方法。学习计划通常由学习专业人员组织，构成组织内非正式进行的总学习的一小部分。

This chapter has considered ways to improve the design and nature of learning programmes through the application of a specific process. Learning programmes are generally organized by learning professionals, and form a small part of the total learning that is taking place informally within an organization.

学习的全部内容以及允许学习进行的正式和非正式的机制就是我们所说的组织的“学习文化”。

The totality of learning, and the mechanisms – both formal and informal – that permit it to take place, is what we call an organization’s ‘learning culture’.

学习和工作真正融为一体还需要一段时间。一旦融为一体，工作的感觉就会大不相同——因为它将更多地是做你想做的事情；做对你有意义的事情。

It will be some time before learning and work are truly integrated. Once they are integrated, work will feel very different – since it will be much more about doing the things that you want to do; the things that make sense to you.

如今，“工作”一词的情感意义很大程度上在于被迫去做一些你认为毫无意义的事情——而教育已经为你做好了准备。与此同时，企业学习活动也面临着重组的挑战，以便它能够为资助它的企业带来一些有价值的东西，并让使用它的人的生活变得更好。

Today, the word ‘work’ owes much of its affective significance to being coerced to do things that you don’t find meaningful – a life for which education has prepared you. In the meantime there is the challenge of reorganizing corporate learning activity so that it actually delivers something of value to the business that funds it, and makes life better for the people who use it.

我们必须解决的问题是，企业的学习功能通常不是为了帮助你发展或​​完成你的工作而设计的。它们旨在向你推送内容，假设这会以某种方式帮助你发展或​​完成你的工作。但事实并非如此。员工们每次我们问他们时都会告诉我们这一点。我们却忽略了他们。

The problem we have to tackle is that corporate learning functions aren’t generally designed to help you develop or to do your job. They are designed to push content at you, on the assumption that this will somehow help you develop or do your job. But it doesn’t. And employees tell us that, every single time we ask them. And we ignore them.

我怀疑，知识转移模式和惯例再次应受到指责，这些惯例广泛反映了学校或大学教育的运作方式。学习行业创造了层层官僚主义、仪式和民间传说来保护其商业活动。其中包括“学习成熟度”和“学习型组织”等概念。

I suspect that once again the knowledge transfer model is to blame here, together with conventions which broadly reflect the way that school or university education functions. The learning industry has created layers of bureaucracy, ritual and folklore with which to protect its commercial activities. These include concepts such as ‘learning maturity’ and ‘the learning organization’.

和大多数工作一样，学习工作也有其危险。对我来说，最大的危险之一是，有一天，我正在专心做事，突然不知何故——我可能在网上，或者在开会——碰巧看到了一个“学习成熟度模型”。

Working in learning, as with most jobs, has its hazards. For me, one of the greatest hazards is that I will be minding my business one day when for no particular reason – I may be online, or sitting in a meeting – I come across a ‘learning maturity model’.

学习成熟度模型通常是某种带有方框的图表，旨在向人们展示如何从学习型组织目前所处的失调状态转变为某种组织涅槃状态：“蓬勃发展的学习文化”。我发现它们令人沮丧，因为构建它们的方法通常似乎是搜集当前流行的时尚元素，并将它们排列成某种堆，将较现代的放在最上面。

A learning maturity model is typically some kind of diagram with boxes that purports to show someone how they can get from the dysfunctional state that their learning organization is in today, to some kind of organizational nirvana: ‘The Thriving Learning Culture’. I find them depressing since the way to construct them seems typically to be to scoop up whatever fads are currently in vogue and arrange them in some kind of pile, with the more modern ones at the top.

通常，他们会向你展示如何从一组（在我看来）不起作用的简单事物（如课堂培训）无缝地进展到一组不起作用的更复杂事物（如人工智能和个性化学习途径），以及一组没人能理解的事物，如社交学习和知识管理。

Typically they show you how to progress seamlessly from a simple set of things that (in my opinion) don’t work – like classroom training – to more complex sets of things that don’t work – like AI and personalized learning pathways – via a whole set of things that no one understands, such as social learning and knowledge management.

整个情况建立在摇摇欲坠的基础之上（默认学习就是内容倾倒），并且给人一种错觉，即只要我们花更多的钱，我们将来就能更有效地做完全毫无意义的事情。

The whole picture rests on shaky foundations (a tacit view of learning as content dumping) and the illusion is presented that we will be able to do perfectly pointless things more effectively in future, if only we spend more money.

最阴险的两个流行词是“徽章”和“自主学习”，根据我的经验，这两个词最终可能会被用来对付学习者——他们被鼓励阅读由学习专业人士创建或购买的大量内容库，并作为回报获得“徽章”。徽章只有在反映成就时才有意义（反复点击“下一步”不算数）。

Two of the most insidious buzz-phrases are ‘badges’ and ‘self-directed learning’, which in my experience, may end up being used against learners – they are encouraged to read through vast content libraries created or bought by learning professionals and receive ‘badges’ in return. Badges are only meaningful where they reflect accomplishments (and clicking ‘next’ repeatedly doesn’t count).

总体而言，这些模式的目的似乎是向那些购买了教育行业最后出售的产品的人出售更多的东西——结果发现它没有用，现在他们怀疑地看着销售人员，因为他们兴奋地解释一个更昂贵的解决方案如何真正实现他们之前承诺但未能实现的事情。在我写这篇文章的时候，受人尊敬的大学对收入减少的前景感到恐惧，当有人说服他们 MOOC 是未来时，他们坐立不安。

Overall, the purpose of these models seems to be to sell more stuff to people who bought the last stuff that the learning industry sold them – only to find it didn’t work, and who are now eyeing salespeople suspiciously as they excitedly explain how a more costly solution will actually do the thing they promised to do before, but didn’t. As I write, respectable universities horrified by the prospect of dwindling revenues are shifting uncomfortably in their chairs as someone persuades them that MOOCs are the future.

如果您认为我说得太过分，请回想一下电子学习。电子学习兴起于世纪之交，并将彻底改变学习和教育——使人们能够“随时随地”学习（人们忽略了最后两个描述词是相同的事实），并且“以适合自己的速度”学习，同时“大大降低培训成本”。

In case you think I am going too far – think back to e-learning. E-learning arose at the turn of the century and was going to revolutionize learning and education – enabling people to learn ‘anytime, anyplace, anywhere’ (people ignored the fact that the last two descriptors were the same) and ‘at a pace which suited them’ while ‘dramatically reducing training costs’.

但结果并不理想。如今，电子学习还只是学习的初级阶段，加上学习管理系统，约 80% 的员工只访问过这些系统来完成基于合规性的电子学习模块。但学习行业已经习惯于从过去的错误中吸取教训：我们无法通过电子学习模块、网站或视频实现的目标，我们非常乐观地认为微学习可以实现。

Well, that didn’t turn out so well. E-learning is now confined to the naughty-step of learning, together with learning management systems, which around 80 per cent of employees have only ever visited to complete compliance-based e-learning modules. But the learning industry has become adept at failing to learn from past mistakes: what we couldn’t accomplish with e-learning modules, websites or video, we are wildly optimistic will be achievable with micro-learning.

简而言之，除非我们了解学习，否则我们就无法在教育进步方面取得进步——无论是学校/大学还是企业。

Put simply, unless we understand learning, we will not make progress in advancing education – whether school/university or corporate.

学习设计成熟度模型

A learning design maturity model

为了实现这一目标，我试图绘制一个简单的、不受时尚影响的模型（图 9.1），以帮助组织了解他们目前的状况，并规划未来的发展路线。

In support of that ambition, I have tried to sketch a simple, fad-free model (Figure 9.1) to help organizations understand where they are today, and chart a course to the future.

如果你仔细分析这些术语，就会发现许多组织都停留在第一级——教育。他们可能拥有各种各样的技术，但他们本质上只是向人们推销内容，并努力理解为什么它没有产生预期的影响；他们购买了 LinkedIn Learning，但使用率很低。他们忙于构建“学习途径”来展示他们如何“加强员工价值主张”，但没有人使用它们。

When you cut through the jargon, many organizations are stuck at level 1 – education. They may have all manner of technology, but they are essentially pushing content at people and struggling to understand why it’s not having the desired impact; they bought LinkedIn learning but usage is low. They are busy constructing ‘learning pathways’ to show how they are ‘strengthening their employee value proposition’ but no one is using them.

我越来越多地看到处于 1.5 级的组织——仍在抛弃内容，但开始尝试通过绩效咨询来帮助员工——例如使用清单和聊天机器人。绩效咨询之所以有效，是因为它专注于改善绩效环境，而不是改变员工。

Increasingly I see organizations at level 1.5 – still dumping content, but starting to experiment with performance consulting as a way to help people on the job – for example with checklists and chatbots. Performance consulting works because it focuses on improving the performance environment rather than changing the person.

有些组织完全处于第 2 级——从资源和绩效支持中看到了良好的结果，但对事件和体验却感到困惑？我们应该做这些吗？我们怎样才能做好？什么是混合学习？生活肯定不止清单？如果我们真的希望人们成长呢？

Some organizations are fully at level 2 – seeing good results from resources and performance support, but scratching their heads about events and experiences? Should we do them? How do we do them well? What is hybrid learning? Surely there is more to life than checklists? What if we actually want people to grow?

3 级是一个学习型组织，而不是教育型组织。在 3 级，我们正在建立绩效支持和变革体验，因为我们知道人们想做什么，以及对他们真正重要的是什么。这是他们发展的关键——领导者理解这一点，并提供支持和挑战。学习一直是工作的一部分，但在 3 级，我们正在以刻意的方式设计学习体验。

Level 3 is a learning organization, not an educational one. At level 3 we are building performance support as well as transformative experiences because we know what people are trying to do and what really matters to them. This is the key to their development – and leaders understand that and provide support and challenge. Learning has always been part of work, but at level 3 we are designing learning experiences in a deliberate way.

那么 LXP、xAPI、微学习、社交学习平台、VR、徽章……怎么样？如果你不了解它们适合什么，这些都无关紧要。你会购买它们，然后努力证明你的投资回报（这肯定是我犯的一个错误）。

What about LXPs, xAPI, micro-learning, social learning platforms, VR, badging…? None of these will matter if you haven’t understood where they fit. You’ll buy them, then struggle to demonstrate a return on your investment (that’s certainly a mistake I have made).

如果组织想要改进，他们可以采取哪些实际步骤呢？有两个。

What practical steps can organizations take if they want to improve? There are two.

步骤 1：从课程转向资源

Step 1: Shift from courses to resources

组织在摆脱教育的过程中可以采取的最简单、最有力的措施是质疑期望的结果是否是最好的通过建立课程来实现目标，还是绩效支持（资源）是更好的选择。这一挑战需要在课程设计对话一开始就进行。

The simplest and most powerful step organizations can take in shifting away from education is by challenging whether a desired outcome is best achieved by building a course, or whether performance support (resources) would be a better option. This challenge needs to take place at the very start of a programme design conversation.

这比你想象的要难，因为通常向你咨询课程的人（学习和开发团队）会认为你做的是教育，并且已经对他们想要什么（课程）以及课程中应该包含什么（主题）有了固定的想法。这就是为什么实施以用户为中心的设计流程（例如 5Di）会有所帮助，因为你可以说：“首先我们需要就绩效结果达成一致，然后我们需要与观众交谈”。

It’s harder to do than you might imagine, because often the people asking you – the learning and development team – for a course will assume that what you do is education, and will already have a fixed idea of what they want (a course) and what should go in it (the topics). This is why implementing a user-centred design process (such as the 5Di) can help, because you can say: ‘First we need to agree the performance outcomes, then we need to talk to the audience’.

但为什么还要费心与观众交谈呢？

But why bother talking to the audience at all?

大多数组织不知道员工是如何完成工作的。我知道这一点，因为我花了很多时间与那些试图建立绩效支持的组织打交道。这些组织有职位描述、标准操作程序和培训人们遵循这些程序的课程——所有这些都与人们实际完成工作的方式没有太大关系，只有当你与从事相关工作的人交谈时，你才会发现这一点（尽管你可能已经怀疑了）。

Most organizations don’t know how their employees do their jobs. I know this, because I have spent a lot of time with organizations trying to build performance support. These organizations have job descriptions, standard operating procedures, and courses to train people in following these procedures – none of which bear much relation to how people actually get the job done, which you only discover when you talk to people doing the jobs in question (although you probably suspected as much).

例如，在一家大型保险公司，联络中心的工作人员告诉我，他们在大楼五楼接受的五周新员工培训与他们在一楼的工作方式毫无关系。学习团队对此一无所知。

In one large insurance company, for example, I was told by people who work in the contact centre that the five weeks of new-starter training they received on the fifth floor of the building bore no relation whatsoever to the way they carried out the job on the first floor. The learning team had no idea this was the case.

不过，我的观点是：如果你不知道你公司今天的工作进展如何，那么你很难让人们明天做得更好，或者在未来某个时候实现自动化。虽然制定几乎没人阅读、几乎没人遵循的政策和程序让总部的所有人保住了工作，但组织最终将面临来自竞争对手的压力，这些竞争对手已经摆脱了迷惑，承担了较轻的官僚负担。

My point is this, though: if you don’t actually know how work is getting done today in your business, you’ve got little chance of enabling people to do it better tomorrow, or of automating at some point in the future. While producing policies and procedures that hardly anyone reads and next to nobody follows has kept all those folks in Head Office in jobs, organizations will eventually face pressure from competitors who have had the wool lifted from their eyes, and carry a lighter bureaucratic burden.

在构建资源的过程中，我们发现人们当前的工作方式；通过构建绩效支持，我们使缺乏经验的人（或机器）能够通过编码能力来完成工作。

In the process of building resources, we discover how people are working today; by building performance support we enable inexperienced people (or machines) to do the job by codifying capability.

然而，如今这些知识大多是隐性的，隐藏在组织内部。这只是人们引用彼得·德鲁克关于文化的论述时所暗示的内容之一。

However, today most of this knowledge is currently tacit and hidden within an organization. This is just one of the things that are implied when people quote Peter Drucker on culture.

组织真正的机制是“暗物质”——隐藏在组织文化中的故事、规范和隐性知识。无论有没有机器人，这都会成为你的问题——例如，当人们的工作变动越来越快、能力越来越弱，或者当你努力保持竞争优势时。

The real mechanics of your organization is ‘dark matter’ – the stories, norms and tacit knowledge hidden in your organizational culture. This is going to be a problem for you with or without robots – for example as people change jobs more rapidly, possess less capability, or as you struggle to maintain competitive advantage.

同样，这对学校和大学教育也是一个挑战：如果你想开始转向将学习和工作结合起来，你很快就会发现，几乎没有一个教授商业课程的人了解日常商业挑战以及如何应对这些挑战。

Equally, this is a challenge for school and university education: if you wanted to begin the shift towards merging learning and work, you would quickly discover that next to none of the people teaching on business programmes know a great deal about day-to-day business challenges and how to tackle them.

例如，大学缺乏网络攻击和防御方面的专家，而且他们的专家以主题为中心，而不是以任务为中心。

Universities are not well stocked with staff who are experts in cyber-attack and defence, for example, and their experts are topic- and not task-centric.

因此，实现这一转变的首要任务是详细分析成功完成挑战所涉及的关键任务。我们可以在航空业看到类似的情况，人们使用模拟器来测试他们处理关键程序的能力：起飞、降落、发动机故障。他们需要与飞机制造商密切合作，而不是与大学的工程部门合作，以确保模拟准确反映现实生活。

The first job in making this shift would therefore be a detailed analysis of the critical tasks involved in successfully completing challenges. We can see something like this in the airline industry where a simulator is used to put people through their paces as they tackle critical procedures: take-off, landing, engine failure. They need to work closely with aircraft manufacturers to ensure that the simulation correctly reflects real life, rather than with engineering departments in universities.

创建资源的过程实际上是以可用格式外化知识。我们必须小心避免将资源描述为“学习资源”，因为资源的目标可能恰恰相反：减少某人为实现目标而必须进行的学习量。

The process of creating resources is really about externalizing knowledge, in a usable format. We must be careful to avoid describing resources as ‘learning resources’, since the objective of resources may be precisely the opposite: to reduce the amount of learning someone has to do in pursuit of their goals.

相反，重点必须转移到实用性上。要成为有效的资源，某样东西必须是特定环境中最有用的资产。从反面来说：如果你创造了某种你称之为“资源”的东西，但发现人们没有使用它，那么它很可能根本不是一种资源。这是因为它不是真正有用或可访问的。如果你创造了你认为是极好的工作辅助工具，但人们仍然在给他们的朋友打电话，那么是时候重新开始设计了。

Instead, the focus has to shift to utility. To be an effective resource something has to be the most useful asset in a given context. To express this point negatively: if you have created something that you have called a ‘resource’, but find that people aren’t using it, it is likely that it isn’t actually a resource at all. This will be because it isn’t genuinely useful, or accessible. If you have created what you consider to be an excellent job aid, but people are still phoning their friends, it is time to go back to the drawing board.

这也有一个弊端：当我们为 BP 的新领导者创建数字资源时，我指示团队不仅从内容中完全删除“学习”一词，而且从伴随它的沟通和营销中也完全删除。这是因为你的受众可能会认为你说的“学习”其实是“教育”，人力资源部门打着这个旗号强加给他们的任何东西都是内容倾销，完全是在浪费他们的时间。如果你在进行学习消除，就把“学习”这个词去掉吧；这对每个人都有帮助。

There’s a flip-side to this too: when we created digital resources for new leaders at BP, I instructed the team to entirely remove any use of the word ‘learning’ not only from the content, but from the communication and marketing that accompanied it. This is because your audience is likely to assume that by ‘learning’ you mean ‘education’ and that anything foisted on them under this banner by HR will be content dumping and a complete waste of their time. If you’re doing learning elimination, eliminate the word ‘learning’; it will help everyone.

现在，了解资源在人们生活中所扮演的角色只是一个观察问题：人们一生都在努力实现他们所关心的事情。当他们遇到无法解决的挑战时，他们会依靠一些策略。这些策略可能包括反复试验——或者更有可能打电话给朋友或谷歌搜索答案。

Understanding the role that resources play in people’s lives is now simply a matter of observation: people go through life trying to achieve things that follow from their concerns. As they encounter challenges that they are not already capable of tackling, they rely on a handful of strategies. These may include trial and error – or more likely phoning a friend or Googling the answer.

在后一种情况下，他们真正寻求的是下一步该做什么的分步建议。他们很少寻求我们称之为“知识”的那种以主题为中心的材料，他们也不想学习（除非作为这个过程的副产品）。

In these latter cases, what they are really looking for is step-by-step advice on what to do next. They are rarely looking for the kind of topic-centric material that we term ‘knowledge’, and they are not looking to learn (except as a by-product of this process).

一个很好的例子可能是地图——骑自行车旅行时可能会带的那种。地图的目的不是让你记住路线——恰恰相反：它让你在旅途中可以参考它，而不必记住任何东西。

A good example might be a map – the kind you might take on a cycling trip. The purpose of the map is not to enable you to memorize the route – quite the opposite: it enables you to refer to it as you go along without having to remember anything.

第 2 步：设计体验

Step 2: Design experiences

通过构建资源而不是课程，您可以让组织向前迈出一大步，从而有效地消除组织中的教育。最终结果将是更便宜（资源通常比课堂培训更容易构建和部署），更有效地提高绩效（正如 Atul Gawande 发现的那样），并为员工提供更好的体验（因为在需要时提供指导可以使人们更轻松地完成工作）。

You could take a big step forward as an organization by building resources not courses, effectively eradicating education from your organization. The end result would be cheaper (resources are generally much easier to build and deploy than classroom training), more effective at shifting performance (as Atul Gawande found) and a much better experience for employees (because guidance at points of need makes it easier for people to get stuff done).

Sky 团队正是这么做的。学习预算的减少促使他们从教育模式转向绩效支持^。1

This is precisely what the team at Sky did. A reduction in their learning budget provided a catalyst for shifting from the educational model towards performance support.¹

很容易想象一个组织中不存在教育，人们可以在需要时轻松获取有用的东西（真正有助于他们工作的资源），当人们应对日常挑战并观察周围发生的事情时，学习会很自然地发生。从不需要对人们进行说教。

It’s easy to imagine an organization in which education never existed, in which people can easily access useful stuff – resources that actually help them with the job – when they need it, and where learning happens quite naturally as people tackle everyday challenges and watch what’s going on around them. There was never any need to lecture people.

但最终你会意识到缺少了一些东西。人类是由定义体验塑造的，这些体验是促使他们发展、成长和改变的时刻。相比之下，一个设计完美的绩效支持环境是一种稳定状态——一切都很容易做到，没人学到任何东西。性能得到了优化，但增长却被最小化，因为这两件事是相辅相成的。

But eventually you will realize that something is missing. Human beings are shaped by defining experiences, these are the moments that cause them to develop and grow and change. By contrast a perfectly designed performance support environment is a steady state – everything is easy to do, nobody is learning anything. Performance is optimized but growth is minimized because these two things go hand-in-hand.

事实上，在我们的二级组织中，发展是由人们在工作中面临的挑战推动的。人们正在完成工作，使用我们为他们构建的资源和指导，并且一天天变得更好。这就是学习与工作相结合的样子。

In reality, in our level 2 organization, development is being driven by the challenges people face on the job. People are getting stuff done, using the resources and guidance we’ve built for them, and getting better day by day. This is what integrating learning and work looks like.

这些案例中发生了什么？根据经验法则，学习是由挑战驱动的。绩效支持的美妙之处在于，它让位于一方面，让学习由人们在工作中已经面临的挑战驱动，并为他们提供支持。缺少的是，有时我们想创造挑战，有时我们想以现有工作中不存在的方式改变和培养人们。

What’s going on in these cases? As a rule of thumb, learning is driven by challenges. The beauty of performance support is that is steps to one side, allows learning to be driven by the challenges people already face on the job, and supports them. What’s missing is that there are times when we want to create a challenge, times when we want to change and grow people in ways that aren’t present in the existing work.

当人们加入一个组织时，我们不仅仅希望他们觉得工作容易做。我们希望他们感到兴奋和投入——我们希望他们感到自己属于这里。虽然这些结果不那么有形，但却非常真实业务影响：敬业度与员工的自由努力程度直接相关，员工绩效可能会提升 20% 左右。归属感会影响员工留任率，而员工流失则会产生额外的招聘成本。

When people join an organization we don’t merely want them to find the job easy to do. We want them to feel excited and engaged – we want them to feel like they belong. Whilst less tangible, these outcomes have very real business impact: engagement is directly related to discretionary effort, with a potential performance uplift of around 20 per cent. Belonging impacts retention, and losing staff incurs additional recruitment costs.

另一个例子：当人们转变为领导角色时，他们需要改变。这种改变通常不仅仅是完成一组不同的任务，他们还需要改变对周围人的态度。当我为 BP 领导力计划的设计采访新领导者时，有一条评论出现了好几次：领导者会说：“如果不是因为所有这些人事问题，我想我可以胜任这份工作。”于是我会问：“你是什么意思，‘人事问题’？”他们会这样说：“你知道——所有人力资源方面的废话——绩效对话、发展、个人问题……”。

Another example: when people transition into a leadership role, they need to change. This change generally needs to be much more than completing a different set of tasks, they need to change their attitude to the people around them. When I was interviewing new leaders for the design of the BP leadership programme, one comment came up several times: leaders would say: ‘I think I could do the job if it wasn’t for all the people stuff’. Whereupon I would ask: ‘What do you mean, “people stuff”?’ and they would say something like: ‘You know – all the HR crap – performance conversations, development, personal issues…’.

问题在于，“人事”是领导者的职责；我们发现这占了工作量的 60% 左右。领导者并没有转移注意力，而是坚持做他们成为领导者之前所做的任务。

The problem is that ‘people stuff’ is the role of a leader; we found it comprised around 60 per cent of the job. Leaders weren’t shifting their focus, and instead holding on to the tasks they were doing before becoming a leader.

总而言之，有时组织希望带来的人员变化在其当前所做的工作中并不够充分，如果您想改变人员，您需要设计一种体验。

In summary, there are times when the people change you want to bring about as an organization isn’t sufficiently covered by the jobs they are doing today, where if you want to change people, you need to design an experience.

良好的毕业生入职培训计划应是一次变革性的体验，并伴随着您需要完成的所有事情。良好的领导力培训计划应是一场精彩的活动，并是一个领导力工具包。这才是真正意义上的“混合式”（或“混合式”）学习。

A good graduate induction programme should be a transformative experience, accompanied by all the stuff you need to perform. A good leadership programme should be an amazing event, and a leadership toolkit. This is the true sense of ‘blended’ (or ‘hybrid’) learning.

绩效支持与体验设计

Performance support versus experience design

性能支持和体验设计的区别在于，前者解决的是已有的问题，而后者则会产生新的问题。我举个例子来说明这一点。

The difference between performance support and experience design is that whilst the former addresses existing concerns, the latter builds new ones. Let me give you an example that illustrates this.

我在 BP 工作时，听到过一个故事，讲的是某人设计的一种特别有效的安全体验。它能成为故事，这是一个好兆头：精心设计的体验应该能成为故事（并因此成为文化的一部分）。

When I was at BP, I heard a story about an especially effective safety experience that someone had designed. The fact that it had become a story was a good sign: a well-designed experience should be designed so as to become a story (and part of the culture therefore).

事实证明，一些旨在鼓励人们不要把手伸进危险机器的培训是无效的（大概是因为变通方法已经成为常态），因此有人设计了一种变革性的体验，让参与者必须在他们惯用的手上戴一个红色的袋子——持续一天。

It turned out that some training aimed at encouraging people not to stick their hands in dangerous machinery had been ineffective (presumably because workarounds had become normalized), so instead someone had designed a transformative experience in which participants had to wear a red bag tied over their dominant hand – for a day.

为什么？因为人不像电脑那样工作——你不能简单地给他们指令，然后指望他们的行为会改变。这可能是培训计划失败的最大原因。手上戴包是一种强大的体验。它让人们意识到生活会变得多么困难，他们会感到多么不自在，多么沮丧……他们会努力做多少事情。

Why? Because people don’t work like computers – you can’t simply give them instructions and expect their behaviour to change. This is probably the biggest source of failure in training programmes. Wearing a bag on the hand was a powerful experience. It made people aware of just how difficult life would become, of how self-conscious they would feel, how frustrated… how many things they would struggle to do.

他们永远不会忘记这件事，这个故事也因此而具有了自己的生命力。

They never forgot it, and the story took on a life of its own.

认为只要向人们展示 PowerPoint 演示文稿并期望他们做出改变的想法是大错特错的。清单很棒，但人们只有在足够关心的情况下才会使用它们。改变——真正的改变——需要体验设计。通过绩效支持，我们依赖工作生活所提供的体验；通过体验设计，我们创造新的体验。

It’s a big mistake to think we can show people a PowerPoint presentation and expect them to change. Checklists are great, but people will only use them if they care enough to use them. Change – real change – requires experience design. With performance support we rely on the experiences that working life presents; with experience design we create new ones.

超越成熟：走向自动化之路

Beyond maturity: the path to automation

GPS 比地图好得多。地图是一种很好的资源，但你必须经常停下来弄清楚你在哪里。GPS 会告诉你下一步该做什么，因为它了解地图，也知道你在哪里。

GPS is much better than a map. A map is a great resource, but you have to regularly stop and figure out where you are. A GPS tells you what to do next because it knows the map, and it knows where you are.

一旦你创建了一套资源，使经验很少或没有经验的人能够很好地做某事，你就已经向前迈出了一大步——但（正如我们所发现的）你仍然依赖于人们在正确的时间找到正确的资源来使用。

Once you have created a set of resources that enable someone with little or no experience to do something well, you have already taken a big step forward – but (as we have discovered) you are still dependent on people finding the right resource to use at the right time.

这就是 Google 目前的状况：它是一个很好的资源，但你仍然需要自己查找——如果它拥有足够的信息，让你无需查找就能知道你需要什么，那不是很好吗？（Google 确实已经开始使用 Google Now 尝试这种方法。他们很可能缺乏足够的背景信息来使这种方法发挥作用。）

This is how things stand with Google today: it’s a great resource, but you still have to look things up – wouldn’t it be great if it had enough information about you to know what you need without you having to look it up? (Google have indeed starting experimenting with this approach with Google Now. In all probability they lack sufficient contextual information to make the approach work well.)

在资源中添加上下文信息有助于创建绩效指导系统，如 GPS，这反过来又会大大降低做好某件事所需的能力水平。Uber 不是颠覆性的，GPS 才是颠覆性的——没有 GPS，Uber 就不可能存在。

The addition of contextual information to resources enables the creation of performance guidance systems, like GPS, which in turn bring about a second dramatic reduction in the level of competence required to do something well. Uber is not disruptive, GPS is disruptive – Uber could not exist without GPS.

就像 GPS 一样，绩效指导系统不必是令人难以置信的复杂 AI；例如，只需几个数据点就足以为领导者提供如何提高团队绩效和参与度的指导。一旦你拥有了一个人需要的资源，这就是开始寻找可能告诉你的数据的好时机哪些资源，何时。一些简单的东西，比如他们的日历，可能会告诉你所有你需要知道的信息。

Just like GPS, performance guidance systems don’t have to be mind-bogglingly sophisticated AI; just a few data points are enough to give leaders guidance on how to improve the performance and engagement of their teams, for example. Once you have the resources that a person needs, that’s a good point to start looking for data that might tell you which resource, when. Something simple, like their calendar, might tell you all you need to know.

希望现在的进展已经相当清晰：当​​你弄清楚了需要做什么的规则时，在你的组织中（首先要认识到这些规则几乎与你今天所制定的规则完全不同），你就可以考虑自动化了：例如，你知道 HR 机器人应该如何响应 95% 的入站请求，并且你可以与应用程序开发人员分享这些信息。

Hopefully the progression is now pretty clear: by the time you’ve figured out the rules for what needs to be done, when, in your organization (starting with the realization that these are almost completely different from the rules you have in place today), you are in a good position to consider automation: for example, you know what an HR-bot should say in response to 95 per cent of inbound requests, and you could share these with an app developer.

您知道什么能让人们在技术岗位上取得成功，并且您可以编写一个机器来以类似的方式工作。您不会说“恭喜，您是领导者，这里有一些关于领导风格的东西”，而是知道领导者在不同阶段需要说什么和做什么来提高绩效和参与度。

You know what makes people successful in a technical role, and you could program a machine to work similarly. Instead of saying ‘Congratulations, you’re a leader, here’s some stuff on leadership styles’, you know what it is that a leader needs to say and do at various points to improve performance and engagement.

当然，复制次优的工作方式存在风险，但同样，人们今天做事的方式往往都有充分的理由。

There is, of course, a risk that you are replicating sub-optimal ways of working – but equally there is often a good reason why people do things the way they do today.

总而言之，您现在可以做一些事情来为未来的自动化做好准备，例如创建简单的单页指南和清单。通常，当我们做这类工作时，我们会发现人们已经开始自己做这些事情了，这是标准操作程序 (SOP) 和培训冗余的表现——这些资源已经在办公桌和共享驱动器上非正式地流通。

In summary, there are things you can do today to prepare for automation in the future, such as the creation of simple one-page guides and checklists. Often, when we do this kind of work, we find that people have already started doing this for themselves, as a symptom of the redundancy of standard operating procedures (SOPs) and training – and these resources are already circulating informally across desks and shared drives.

绝大多数组织都会制定类似 SOP 的规则来描述人们应该如何完成工作。问题在于，对工作应该如何完成的理想化描述通常从一开始就是多余的，而且随着时间的推移，它会越来越偏离现实。

The vast majority of organizations create something like SOPs as a way of describing how people should do their jobs. The problem is that an idealized description of how a job should be done is typically redundant from the outset, and drifts further and further from reality as time goes on.

因此，这次旅程的起点就是这个问题：“我们如何才能捕捉人们今天正在做的事情，以简单的指令形式呈现？”

So the starting point for this journey is this question: ‘How can we capture what people are doing today, as simple instructions?’

新冠疫情如何改变学习和教育

How Covid changed learning and education

^{2020 年 3 月 14 日，也}就是封锁前两天，我加入德勤，担任英国首席学习官。2不确定性正在酝酿，我是众多经验丰富的员工之一，被分成小组，被带到不同的房间，每个人都收到了一台笔记本电脑和一份说明清单。我们要登录，检查我们是否可以访问正确的系统，然后找到合规学习模块。

I joined Deloitte as the Chief Learning Officer for the UK on 14 March 2020, two days before lockdown.² Uncertainty was brewing, I was one of a number of experienced hires split into small groups and ushered into separate rooms where we each received a laptop and a list of instructions. We were to log in, check we had access to the correct systems, and find our way to the compliance learning modules.

罗维娜在房间之间来回穿梭，毫无畏惧，满怀热情——在当时的情况下尽力回答我们的问题。罗维娜将永远令人难忘。我想，她表现出一种困惑的接受。经验丰富的商人学会抑制明显的情绪表现，所以无论我们个人经历什么，我们表面上都保持着镇定和乐观的态度。几个小时后，我们被送回家，并被告知第二天再来领取我们的徽章。

Rowena was flitting between rooms, undaunted and brimming with enthusiasm – doing her best in the circumstances to answer our questions. Rowena will always be memorable. There was a kind of bemused acceptance, I suppose. Experienced businesspeople learn to suppress overt displays of emotion, so whatever we were experiencing personally we remained outwardly unflustered and upbeat. After a couple of hours of this we were sent home, and told to return to collect our badges the next day.

事实证明，第二天是对在家办公的全面考验。我来到令人印象深刻的伦敦办公室，发现除了保安和工作场所经理外，只有我一个人在那里。我拿起我的徽章，也许是出于习惯，我找到了一张空桌子，坐下来工作，独自一人在那栋巨大的建筑里。我想我需要感觉到我已经“到达”了。

As it turned out, the next day was a full-scale test of home-working. I arrived at the impressive London office to find that – barring the security staff and workplace manager – I was the only person there. I picked up my badge and – perhaps from force of habit – found myself a spare desk and sat down to work, alone in that giant building. I needed to feel that I had ‘arrived’, I suppose.

第二天，和其他人一样，我在家办公。结果比预期的要好：我们之前都举行过虚拟会议，我们知道如何利用技术和基础设施。甚至还有一点令人兴奋的元素：人们乘坐过山车是为了体验在危险中生存的刺激。不知何故，我们——集体——乘上了这股浪潮。

The next day, like everybody else, I worked from home. It worked out better than expected: we had all held virtual meetings before, we knew how to use the technology and the infrastructure held up. There was even an element of excitement: people ride rollercoasters to experience the thrill of surviving danger. Somehow we were – collectively – riding the wave.

回想起来，很明显，用库伯勒-罗斯变化曲线的术语来说，我们当时处于“否认”状态。我们以为我们会像这样工作几个星期，然后一切就会恢复正常。

Looking back, it was clear that – in Kübler-Ross change curve terms – we were in ‘denial’. We thought we would be working like this for a few weeks, then things would get back to normal.

我做梦也没有想到，18 个月后，我仍然没有和大多数同事见面。这简直令人难以置信。

I could not in my wildest dreams have imagined that 18 months later I would still have not met most of my colleagues face to face. It was inconceivable.

恢复“正常”

Returning to ‘normal’

在接下来的几个月里，“恢复正常”的说法一直盛行。这不仅仅是因为我们拒绝承认，而是因为更深层次的渴望让事情“恢复正常”。

The ‘return to normal’ narrative was the prevailing one for many months to come. It was not simply that we were in denial, this denial was driven by a deeper desire for things to ‘get back to normal’.

我自信地预测，9 月份的毕业生入学情况将恢复正常，并建议不要取消场地预订。事实证明这是一个错误的决定，但场地（预计情况会恢复正常）很乐意将我们的预订推迟到 2 月。回想起来，我意识到这种坚持常态的需要有多么强烈——可以说几乎是病态的。人们竭尽全力试图重建常态。

I confidently predicted that things would be back to normal for our September graduate intake, and advised against cancelling our venue bookings. This turned out to be the wrong decision, but the venues (expecting things to get back to normal) were happy to defer our booking until February. I realize in retrospect how powerful this need to adhere to normality is – one might say almost pathological. People went to bizarre lengths to try to recreate normality.

随着秋天的临近，一款名为 Houseparty 的应用程序引起了一阵兴奋，它承诺让我们能够以数字方式交流。我们中的许多人都使用过它，但最终都有相同的体验：它很糟糕。感觉就像我们在一天结束时又安排了一次 Zoom 会议。感觉像是一件苦差事。这不是一个好的体验，我们都停止使用它，却不太明白为什么。

As autumn approached there was flurry of excitement around an app called Houseparty that promised to allow us to mingle digitally. Many of us used it, and ultimately had the same experience: it sucked. It felt as though we had scheduled yet another Zoom meeting at the end of the day. It felt like a chore. It wasn’t a good experience, and we all stopped using it without quite understanding why.

总的来说，我们被迫进入数字世界，这向我们展示了物理世界有多么重要，以及我们对其中原因的理解有多么匮乏。

Overall, our enforced displacement into the digital world was showing us all how much the physical world mattered and how poorly we understood why.

同样的经历也反映在我们的组织中：人们正在遭受“Zoom 疲劳”的折磨。没有人真正理解 Zoom 疲劳是什么：他们没有一个解释框架来解释为什么同样的会议在网上举行与面对面举行感觉非常不同。理性地说，这应该没什么问题。从情感上来说，这太可怕了。

The same experience was reflected at scale in our organizations: people were suffering from ‘Zoom fatigue’. Nobody quite understood what Zoom fatigue was: they didn’t have an explanatory framework to account for why doing the same meetings online felt very different from doing them face to face. Rationally speaking it should have been fine. Emotionally speaking, it was horrible.

如果这对我们不利，对我们的孩子来说更糟糕。很多人担心这会对他们的教育产生影响，但这可能对他们的学习产生了积极影响：对于那些没有被强制休假的孩子来说，他们终于能够看到父母工作，听他们说话，看看他们靠什么谋生。

If it was bad for us; it was worse for our children. There was lots of hand-wringing over the impact on their education, but probably it had a positive impact on their learning: for those who weren’t furloughed children were finally able to watch their parents work, listen to how they talked and see what they did for a living.

他们也有更多时间沉浸在真正的学习工具中——比如 TikTok——它可以讲述他们真正关心的事情：如何穿衣、说话、跳舞——什么音乐很酷，他们属于哪个部落，他们对哪些社会问题有强烈的感受，以及什么是有趣的。

They also had more time to indulge in real learning tools – such as TikTok – which spoke to the things they really cared about: how to dress, talk, dance – what music was cool, what tribe they belonged to, what social issues they felt strongly about and what was funny.

最终，这对教育并没有产生太大影响——在许多情况下，考试成绩实际上有所提高——因为这主要包括考试前几周的临时抱佛脚。孩子们越来越怀疑坐在屏幕前听老师讲课的价值。但他们确实渴望回到学校——迫切地渴望。不是因为教育，而是因为他们想念朋友。他们想念在一起的感觉。我们也一样。

In the end there wasn’t much impact on education – in many cases exam results actually improved – because this mostly comprises cramming for tests in the weeks beforehand. Children were increasingly sceptical about the value of sitting at a screen listening to a teacher lecture them. But they did long to go back to school – desperately. Not because of education, but because they missed their friends. They missed being together and how that feels. And we did too.

通过“提前登机”进行创新

Innovating with ‘pre-boarding’

从学习的角度来看，我们早期需要应对一些挑战：面对业务不确定性，我们决定将毕业生的入学时间推迟 8 个月。与其简单地给人们发一封信，说“对不起，我知道你原本计划在 9 月开始工作，但我们明年 5 月才会见到你”，我建议我们借此机会尝试各种方法来改善“入学前”的体验。

From a learning perspective there were some challenges to address early on: in the face of business uncertainty we decided to defer our graduate intake for a period of eight months. Rather than simply sending people a letter saying – effectively – ‘Sorry, I know you were expecting to start in September but we will see you in May next year,’ I suggested we take the opportunity to experiment with ways to improve the ‘pre-boarding’ experience.

事实是，在新毕业生报名和入职之间的这段时间内，我们总是错失更好地支持他们的机会——通常有几个月的间隔，这段时间他们可能有动力去更多地了解他们即将加入的组织。

The truth was that there had always been a missed opportunity to better support our new graduates in the time between signing up to join and the day they joined – often a gap of several months when they might have been motivated to learn more about the organization they were soon to be a part of.

我的团队展现了非凡的决心和适应能力，根据之前新员工所重视的内容，建立了一条包含核心课程和选修课程的多线程学习途径。我们组织了伙伴——通常是前几年入职的分析师——并设置了“咖啡聊天”活动，让员工随机与更资深的人配对，聊他们喜欢的话题。

In a remarkable display of determination and adaptability, my team built a multithreaded learning pathway with core and elective elements, based on what previous new starts had said they valued. We organized buddies – typically analysts from previous years’ intakes – and set up ‘coffee chats’ where people were matched with more senior people at random to chat about whatever they liked.

我们有一系列更正式的会议，涵盖核心能力和任务，例如项目管理和会议礼仪，以及更非正式的社交会议。我们有内部发言人和外部发言人分享他们的故事，朱莉描述了我们的“商业化学”模型，并谈到了一些新人关心的事情——比如如何给人留下良好的第一印象。

There was a more formal series of sessions covering core capabilities and tasks, such as project management and meeting etiquette, as well as more informal networking sessions. We had internal speakers and external speakers sharing their stories, Julie describing our ‘business chemistry’ model, and talking about some of the things new starts cared about – like how to make a good first impression.

我们有选修模块来满足人们将要加入的业务部门的具体情况，以及与整个公司的能力相关的核心模块。我们组织了一个 Facebook 小组，制定了内容策略，并引导人们访问“发现德勤”上外部托管的数字资源。

We had elective modules to cater for the specifics of the business units people would be joining, and core modules relating to firm-wide capabilities. We organized a Facebook group, pulled together a content strategy, and directed people to digital resources hosted externally on ‘Discover Deloitte’.

这样做有效吗？是的——出席率很高（尽管我们学会了不要在人们可能上班的时候安排课程），与信心和参与度等具体结果相关的反馈确实非常积极，最重要的是，我们最担心的事情——由于延期，退学率会增加——并没有发生。事实上，我们的退学人数比前几年少了。

Did it work? Yes – attendance was high (although we learned not to schedule sessions when people might be at work), feedback relating to specific outcomes such as confidence and engagement was very positive indeed, and most importantly the thing that we most feared – that drop-out rates would increase as a result of the deferral – didn’t happen. In fact we had fewer drop-outs than in previous years.

培训课程

Training sessions

与此同时，我们几乎所有的内部培训都转向了数字化交付：主要通过 Zoom 进行。这是一把双刃剑：培训成本大幅降低，我们能够将数百万英镑的培训预算（主要是场地支出）返还给企业。

At the same time that this was happening almost all of our internal training switched to digital delivery: predominantly via Zoom. This was something of a double-edged sword: there was a huge reduction in the cost of delivering training, and we were able to return millions of pounds of training budget (predominantly venue spend) to the business.

另一方面，缺席和取消的人数激增。人们可能觉得，相比需要出差的培训课程，不参加 Zoom 培训课程更容易被接受。公平地说，这些培训课程往往很乏味：培训课程的吸引力很大一部分在于有机会聚在一起，离开工作，与同事建立联系。这也是组织表达对员工重视的一种方式——每个人都明白，面对面培训很昂贵，而数字培训很便宜。

On the other hand, no-shows and cancellations spiked. Presumably people felt that it was more acceptable to duck out of a Zoom training session than one where they were expected to travel. And to be fair they tended to be dull: a big part of the appeal of training sessions is the opportunity to get together, to step away from the job, and network with colleagues. It’s also a way that the organization signals the value it places on employees – everyone understands that face-to-face training is expensive and digital training is cheap.

当然，所有这些元素都从 Zoom 版本中消失了，Zoom 版本往往更短，并且主要基于 PowerPoint 演示文稿。

Of course all of these elements vanished from the Zoom equivalents, which tended to be shorter and predominantly based around PowerPoint presentations.

但更深层次的问题是：疫情暴露了教育仪式的荒谬性——在任何情况下都是如此。教育活动失去了所有让教育活动变得有价值的非正式元素（与朋友聚会、去令人兴奋的地方、被重视），只不过是有人通过视频链接阅读脚本而已。

The deeper point though is this: the pandemic exposed the ridiculousness of educational ritual – in every context. Stripped of all the informal elements that made educational events worthwhile (getting together with friends, going somewhere exciting, being made to feel valued) educational events were little more than somebody reading a script over a video link.

所有这些都引出了我们早就应该问的问题：如果情况就是这样，为什么我们不直接把演示文稿发给人们并让他们审阅呢？如果我们需要知道他们是否审阅了它，为什么不创建一个测试（这实际上是我们的合规学习系统所扮演的角色）？

All of which begged the question we should have been asking long ago: if this is all that’s going on, why don’t we just send people the presentation and ask them to review it? If we needed to know they had reviewed it, why not create a test (which was effectively the role that our compliance learning system was playing)?

这一核心信息或许是此次疫情给企业带来的最大教训：在封锁期间，企业试图鼓励人们回到办公室。在我写这篇文章的时候，他们还在这么做。但现在非常清楚的是，如果你只是坐在 Zoom 电话会议或回复电子邮件，去办公室是没有意义的——如果你只是盯着 PowerPoint 演示文稿，举行面对面的会议或培训活动也是没有意义的。

This central message turned out to be perhaps the biggest corporate lesson of the pandemic: in-between lockdowns organizations tried to encourage people to go back to the office. As I write they are still doing that. But it was now abundantly clear that there’s no point going to the office if you’re just going to sit on Zoom calls or answer emails – no point in holding in-person meetings or training events if you’re just going to stare at a PowerPoint deck.

正如教育界忽视了聚会中所有真正重要的部分一样，企业界也忽视了演示只不过是人们聚在一起的一个借口。

Just as education had overlooked all the really important parts of getting together, business had overlooked that presentations were little more than a pretext for people to get together.

这是第一次，我们所有人都必须认真思考体验设计，并有意识地考虑如何让我们在一起的时间变得有价值。领导者不知道该如何与他们的团队打交道，顾问不知道该如何与他们的客户服务，学习专业人士也不知道该如何回答同一个问题：“如果我们不看 PowerPoint 演示文稿，我们在一起做什么？”

For the first time, we were all having to think hard about experience design and consciously consider how to make our time together worthwhile. Leaders were struggling to know what to do with their teams, consultants to know what to do with their clients, and learning professionals were struggling to answer the same question: ‘What do we do together, if we’re not looking at a PowerPoint presentation?’

除了 PowerPoint 之外的学习

Learning beyond PowerPoint

站在贵公司首席财务官的角度想想。在新冠疫情期间，您了解到，通过在线授课而不是在昂贵的场所授课，可以节省数百万英镑。更妙的是，通过消除旅行时间和减少教学时间，企业节省了大量的生产时间。数百人可以参加以前最多只有二十人的课程。

Put yourself in the shoes of your organization’s Chief Financial Officer. During the Covid-19 pandemic you learned that millions of pounds could be saved by delivering education online instead of at an expensive venue. Even better, huge numbers of productive hours were returned to the business by eliminating travel time and reducing instruction time. Hundreds of people could attend a session previously capped at two dozen.

您不知道这种新形式是否具有类似的影响力，因为坦率地说，您从未见过培训团队对此有任何特别有说服力的言论。现在，您会如何回应一个商业案例，该案例提议将人们送到昂贵的地方，以便他们接受“培训”？无论您要在该商业案例中写什么，最好不要归结为让人们聚在一起向他们展示一些幻灯片！

You don’t know whether this new format has a comparable impact because, frankly, you’ve never seen anything especially persuasive from the training team about that. How would you now respond to a business case proposing to fly people to an expensive location so that they could be ‘trained’? Whatever you were going to put in that business case, it had better not boil down to getting people together to show them some slides!

企业学习行业现在有了一个令人信服的理由，要从教育（向人们展示 PowerPoint 演示文稿）转向学习（设计体验）。虽然每个人对如何进行后者都一无所知，但很明显，让人们聚在一起分享要点，最好的情况下是毫无意义的，最坏的情况下是危险的。

The corporate learning industry now had a compelling reason to move away from education (showing people PowerPoint decks) and move to learning (designing experiences). Whilst everyone was pretty much in the dark regarding how to do the latter, it was abundantly clear that getting people together to share bullet points was at best pointless and at worse risky.

企业领导者本能地意识到，我们需要有更好的理由来开会：我们只有在做一些无法通过 Zoom 完成的事情时才应该开会。奇怪的是，企业员工很难接受聚在一起的想法，除非他们盯着信息看^。3

Business leaders intuitively grasped that we would need to have much better reasons for meeting: we should only be meeting when we were doing something we couldn’t do over Zoom. Oddly, people in businesses struggled with the idea of coming together if not to stare at information.³

事实上，新冠肺炎疫情为我们提供了一个机会，让我们可以应用以人为本的学习设计，成为首批展示如何大规模以不同方式进行学习的组织之一，使用 5Di 模型实现混合学习。我所说的混合学习，并不是指我们熟悉的数字和面对面的混合（两者都以内容为中心），而是指资源和经验的混合（无论是否数字化）。

As it happened, Covid-19 presented us with an opportunity to apply human-centred learning design and be one of the first organizations to show how learning could be done differently at scale, using the 5Di model to realize hybrid learning. By hybrid learning, I don’t mean the familiar blend of digital and face to face (both content-focused), but instead a hybrid of resources and experiences (whether digital or not).

最终，新冠疫情让我们改变了一些早就应该改变的事情。正如一位资深同事曾经说过的，“永远不要浪费一场好的危机。”

In the end, the Covid-19 pandemic enabled us to change some of the things that we should have been changed long ago. As a senior colleague once said, ‘Never waste a good crisis.’

2000 多年前，柏拉图问道：“什么是正义的生活？”

More than 2,000 years ago Plato asked: ‘What is the just life?’

如果你跳到伦理学史的最后一页，这个问题的答案最终是“只要感觉正义就行”，但遗憾的是，我们一开始就犯了错误，试图用理性将其简化为一套规则，在这个过程中导致了 2000 年的哲学盲目摸索。（顺便说一句，柏拉图的答案是，一个人越理性，就越公正。所以这很有效。）

If you skip to the last page in the history of ethics, the answer to that question is – ultimately – ‘Whatever feels just’, but sadly we got off on the wrong foot by trying to use reason to reduce it to a set of rules, in the process spawning 2,000 years of philosophical faffing about along a blind alley. (Plato’s answer, by the way, was that the more rational a person is, the more just they will be. So that worked out well.)

但让我们先回顾一下。

But let’s back up a few steps.

想象一下，你的兄弟得了病，快要死了。有一种治疗方法——一粒药就能治好他——但你买不起。你知道销售这种药的制药公司收取的费用是制造成本的十倍。为了救你垂死的兄弟，你从药店偷药是对的吗？

Imagine that your brother is dying of a disease. There is a treatment – a single pill that would cure him – but you are not able to afford it. You know that the drug company that sell the pill charge ten times what it costs to make. Is it right for you to steal the pill from the drug store in order to save your dying brother?

我不会给你答案，也不会与你争论。相反，我希望你注意当你被问到这样的问题时你内心发生了什么：情绪在变化，基于本能反应而形成立场。这种本能反应很可能是由你读到的“制药巨头”评论或你对碰巧是药剂师的朋友的感受形成的。你很可能并不知道——但你的情绪已经形成立场，你的头脑已经在编造论据并预期领土防御。

I’m not going to give you the answer, or argue with yours. Instead, I’d like you to notice what goes on inside you when you are asked a question like this: there is a shuffling of sentiments, an alignment to a position based on an instinctive reaction. It may well be that the instinctive reaction has been formed by that ‘Big Pharma’ critique you read, or your feelings towards your friend who happens to be a pharmacist. In all probability you don’t really know – but your sentiments have already taken a position and your mind is already concocting arguments and anticipating a territorial defence.

你怀疑前面会有一场对话——两人或多人来来回回，争论越来越激烈——而且很可能以分歧告终。这可能是一个自由派/保守派的问题。你对这件事将如何发展有一种熟悉的感觉。

You suspect there is a conversation ahead – one where two or more people go to and fro, getting increasingly heated – and most likely ending in disagreement. It’s probably a liberal/conservative type issue. You have a familiar feeling about how this will play out.

哲学家路德维希·维特根斯坦（Ludwig Wittgenstein）曾为伦理学而苦恼。他曾说，伦理学是试图描述一幅“模糊的画面”。但他在伦理学方面遇到的问题，其实也是他开始在一切事物中遇到的问题：你越仔细观察概念，就越会意识到它们的边缘是模糊的。

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein struggled with ethics. He talked about it as trying to describe a ‘blurred picture’. But the problem he had with ethics turns out to be the problem he began to experience with everything: the closer you look at concepts, the more you realize that their edges are blurred.

有些概念一开始看起来很模糊 - 比如“爱” - 而有些概念从远处看起来很清晰 - 比如“椅子” - 直到你靠近（或尝试教给计算机）你才会意识到它们也很模糊。

There are concepts which start out looking blurry – like ‘love’ – and then there are ones that look pretty clear-cut from a distance – like ’chair’ – until you get up close (or try to teach them to a computer) and only then do you realize that they, too, are blurry.

伦理学是从一开始就显得相当模糊的概念之一，因此研究伦理学可以帮助我们理解认知的情感基础所带来的挑战。

Ethics is one of the concepts that looks pretty blurry from the start, so studying it can help us to understand the kinds of challenges that having an affective basis for cognition presents.

道德进步

Ethical progressions

迈克尔·桑德尔 (Michael Sandel) 在其广受欢迎的伦理演讲中向我们提出了两个经典（现在已经过时）的难题。1^你站在火车轨道的交叉口，一列失控的火车沿着轨道飞驰而下，如果它继续沿着目前的路线行驶，将会杀死五个（莫名其妙地）被绑在轨道上的人，而如果你拉动控制杆，火车就会改变路线，只杀死一个人（也绑在轨道上）。该怎么办？

In his popular talks on ethics, Michael Sandel presents us with two classic (and by now hackneyed) dilemmas.¹ You are standing at the junction in a train track, a runaway train is hurtling down the track, if it continues on its current course it will kill five people who are (inexplicably) tied to the track, whilst if you pull the lever, it will change course and kill only one person (also tied to the track). What to do?

显然，正确的做法是拉动杠杆。但在我们进入下一个复杂程度之前，请注意我们很容易混淆这一区别：如果一个人是纳尔逊·曼德拉，而其他五个人是他残暴的狱警，情况会怎样？可能的组合是无穷无尽的。

It seems pretty clear that the right thing to do would be to pull the lever. But just before we move on to the next level of complexity, note how easily we can blur this distinction: what if the one person were Nelson Mandela and the five others his sadistic prison guards? The possible combinations are endless.

但让我们暂时把这个问题放在一边，考虑一下道德进步的下一步：现在你站在铁轨上的一座桥上。铁轨上没有交叉点，只有五个人再次被绑在铁轨上，如果你不干预，他们很可能会死亡。虽然这一次你不能拉动杠杆，但有一个肥胖的人正倚在桥上，如果你把他推到铁轨上，很可能会导致火车停下来或脱轨。

But let’s leave that to one side for the moment and consider the next step in the ethical progression: now you are standing on a bridge over the track. There is no junction in the track, only five people once more tied to the rails who will likely die if you don’t intervene. Whilst this time you cannot pull a lever, there is an obese person leaning over the bridge who – if you were to push them onto the track – would likely cause the train to stop or derail.

问题是：你会把人推到铁轨上，让火车停下来，拯救五个人吗？大多数人对这个想法感到畏缩。感觉不对。但是——争论的焦点是——把人推到铁轨上杀死一个人和拉动控制杆让火车转向杀死一个人，这在逻辑上有什么区别呢？

The question is: would you push the person onto the track to stop the train and save five people? Most people recoil at the idea. It just ‘feels’ wrong. But – goes the argument – what is the difference logically between killing one person by pushing them onto the tracks and pulling the lever which kills the person by diverting the train?

人们很难表达出合乎逻辑的反应。有些人认为“身体行为”（即实际上必须推动某人）是决定因素。但事实是：没有合乎逻辑的反应。这是一个诡计。这个例子所做的只是揭示日常概念背后的情感机制。

People struggle to articulate a logical response. Some people talk about ‘physical agency’ (i.e. actually having to push someone) as being the deciding factor. But the truth is: there is no logical response. It’s a trick. All the example does is expose the affective mechanics behind everyday concepts.

陀思妥耶夫斯基在《罪与罚》一书中讲述了一个年轻人的故事，他名叫拉斯柯尔尼科夫，是个聪明却穷困潦倒的学生，生活绝望。他认为，从逻辑上讲，结束住在他楼里的一个邪恶老妇人的生命是合理的。这个女人显然是个卑鄙的家伙，但她有一大笔钱，拉斯柯尔尼科夫认为，这些钱可以更好地利用。客观地说，他认为，杀死她是件好事。于是他真的这么做了。用斧头。

In his book Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky tells the tale of a young man, Raskolnikov, living a desperate life as a brilliant but impoverished student, who reasons that it makes sense, logically, to end the life of a wicked old woman living in his building. The woman in question is clearly a nasty piece of work, but has a considerable stash of cash which – Raskolnikov reasons – could be put to better use. Objectively, he decides, it would be a good thing to dispatch her. Which he does. With an axe.

接下来发生的事情才是故事的真正意义：虽然拉斯柯尔尼科夫能够说服自己，从理性上讲，他做了正确的事，但他对自己所做之事的感受却困扰着他，最终，他深感愧疚，向当地警方自首。换句话说，对与错不是由他的想法决定的，而是由他的感受决定的。

What then happens is the real point of the story: whilst Raskolnikov is able to convince himself that, rationally speaking, he did the right thing, his feelings about what he has done haunt him so that eventually, consumed by guilt, he hands himself into the local police. In other words, right and wrong were not defined by what he thought, but by how he felt.

这对于我们应对失控列车的困境有何启示？

What does this tell us about our runaway train dilemma?

“什么是正确的做法？”这个问题的答案是：“只要你觉得做对了，就去做”——答案再清楚不过了。你的感受可能会因为一场争论而改变。你的感受可能会因为你对超重人群的感受而改变——或者因为一个人的外表而改变。你可能会坐在演讲厅里，决定某件事是正确的做法，然后——就像拉斯柯尔尼科夫一样——决定你在现实中无法做到这一点。

The answer to the question ‘What is the right thing to do?’, is: ‘Whatever feels like the right thing to do’ – and it will never get any clearer than that. Your feelings might be changed by an argument. Your feelings might be changed by how you happen to feel about overweight people – or by the look of a person. You might sit in a lecture hall and decide that something is the right thing to do and then – just like Raskolnikov – decide that you just can’t bring yourself to do it in reality.

想象一下这样的场景：你站在路口，手里拿着操纵杆，确信自己必须让即将造成五人死亡的火车改道，然后你引起了那个即将被你拉动操纵杆处死的人的注意。他们看着你，脸上带着深深的悲伤——绝望和恐惧——你就是无法下定决心这么做。

Picture the scene: you are standing at the junction, lever in hand, convinced that you must divert the train that is about to kill five people and then you catch the eye of the terrified person you are about to condemn to death by pulling the lever. They look at you with an expression of such deep sorrow – such desperation and fear – that you just can’t bring yourself to do it.

与“椅子”一词的模糊性相比，道德的模糊性是一个更引人注目的话题，因为它会带来一些重大后果：例如法律和人工智能（AI）。

The blurriness of ethics is a much more compelling topic than, say, the blurriness of the word ‘chair’ because there are some big consequences attached: the law and artificial intelligence (AI), for example.

在制定法律时，我们试图在没有界限的地方划线——结果法律案件的结果往往让人感觉不对。

In formulating laws we try to draw lines where none exist – and as a consequence the outcome of legal cases can often still feel wrong.

以最近的一起案件为例，一名 78 岁的退休老人在家中遭到两名持刀和螺丝刀的窃贼袭击。媒体报道称，他与袭击者搏斗时，他的残疾妻子正在楼上睡觉。在随后的搏斗中，一名窃贼受了重伤。两人逃跑，一名窃贼倒在街上，后来死亡，他的同伴也抛弃了他。这名退休老人随后因涉嫌谋杀被捕，但后来无罪释放。有些人称他为英雄。

Consider a recent court case, in which a 78-year old pensioner was attacked in his own home by two burglars, armed with knives and a screwdriver. The media reported that his disabled wife was upstairs in bed as he grappled with the attackers. In the ensuing struggle one of the burglars was badly wounded. The two fled and one collapsed in the street and later died, his companion abandoning him. The pensioner was subsequently arrested on suspicion of murder, but later released without charge. Some people called him a hero.

其他人则选择在窃贼死亡的路边献花和卡片，导致愤怒的公众愤怒地摧毁了临时的路边纪念碑。2^你会做其中一件事吗？

Other people chose to lay flowers and cards at the roadside where the burglar had died, causing outraged members of the public to angrily destroy the makeshift roadside memorial.² Would you do either thing?

现在您已经理解了情感背景，请注意这个故事的每个方面如何巧妙地影响您的是非观。如果这个男人不是一位 78 岁的退休老人，而是一位 35 岁的武术专家，情况会怎样？如果他有三个小孩而不是一个在楼上睡觉的残疾妻子，情况会怎样？如果窃贼的同伴没有将他遗弃在街上，而是勇敢地挣扎着将他送到当地医院，情况会怎样？如果两个窃贼都是女性，情况会怎样？或者是寻求庇护者，情况会怎样？如果您刚吃过午饭，情况会怎样？

Now that you understand affective context, note how every aspect of this story subtly contributes to your feeling of right or wrong. What if – instead of being a 78 year old pensioner – the man had been a 35-year old martial arts expert? What if he had three small children instead of a disabled wife asleep upstairs? What if the burglar’s companion had not abandoned him in the street, but valiantly struggled to carry him to the local hospital? What if both the burglars were women? Or asylum seekers? What if you have just had lunch?

2011 年的一项研究调查了以色列法官作出的 1,000 多项判决，发现法官在一天开始时以及午休后立即作出宽大判决的可能性要大得多。3^该论文的合著者之一乔纳森·莱瓦夫 (Jonathan Levav) 对此进行了总结：“如果你是前三名被考虑的囚犯之一，那么与最后三名被考虑的囚犯相比，你被释放的可能性要高出两到六倍。”

A 2011 study examined over 1,000 verdicts made by Israeli judges and found that judges were far more likely to give lenient verdicts at the start of the day and also immediately after a break, such as lunch.³ Jonathan Levav, one of the co-authors of the paper, summarized it as follows: ‘You are anywhere between two and six times as likely to be released if you’re one of the first three prisoners considered versus the last three prisoners considered.’

根据吃零食的时间，做出有利裁决的可能性从 65% 左右降至 0% 左右。这是一个巨大的差异！现在我们可以解释一下：一个人是否有罪很大程度上取决于你的感受。

The likelihood of a favourable ruling went from around 65 per cent to around 0 per cent, depending on snack times. That’s a massive difference! So now we can now explain it: whether or not someone is innocent or guilty very much depends how you feel.

人们倾向于以一种看似理性但实际上参考自己感受的方式来回答复杂问题，这种倾向被丹尼尔·卡尼曼称为替代原则（也称为属性替代）。本质上，卡尼曼认为我们经常使用自己的感受来回答复杂的逻辑问题，然后将我们的答案呈现为合乎逻辑的结论^。4

This tendency, of people to answer complex questions in a way that seems rational, but is actually done by referring to how they feel, has been dubbed the Substitution Principle by Daniel Kahneman (also called attribute substitution). In essence, Kahneman is saying that we often answer complicated logical questions by using how we feel – and then presenting our answers as if they were logical conclusions.⁴

他举了一个例子：‘你愿意为拯救濒危物种捐献多少？’这个问题很快就变成了‘当我想到濒死的海豚时，我会有怎样的感受？’

He gives an example: the question ‘How much would you contribute to save an endangered species?’ quickly becomes ‘How much emotion do I feel when I think of dying dolphins?’

但是，如果我们尝试通过引入可靠的人工智能来消除所有这些令人讨厌的人类，那么问题能得到解决吗？

But what if we try to eliminate all this pesky humanity by introducing dependable AI – will that solve the problem?

人工智能与学习

AI and learning

随着所谓的人工智能在精密度和复杂性方面的进步，一些人开始担心好莱坞电影中长期描绘的场景会成为现实：机器崛起并系统地消灭它们的创造者，无论是否有简洁的对话。

As so-called AI advances in sophistication and complexity, some people have begun to fear the realization of scenarios long depicted in Hollywood movies in which the machines rise up and systematically obliterate their creators, with or without snappy dialogue.

有人断言，答案是道德。我们需要用道德准则来编写机器程序，就像阿西莫夫著名的《机器人三定律》一样。所有软件程序员只要上几节夜校的道德课，就没问题了。

The answer, some assert, is ethics. We need to programme the machines with ethical guidelines, not unlike Asimov’s famous Laws of Robotics. All the software programmers will take a couple of evening classes in ethics and we will be fine.

我并不是想让你担心，但现在我们了解了道德是如何运作的，我们可以看到这一切是多么的幼稚。举一个最简单的例子——一个我们可以想象在某个地方现在出现的例子：

I don’t mean to worry you, but now that we understand how ethics works we can see how terrifyingly naïve this all is. Take even the simplest example – an example that one can imagine arising, somewhere, right now:

对于人工智能和学习来说，这既带来了深刻的挑战，也带来了表面的机遇。

When it comes to AI and learning, this creates both profound challenges and superficial opportunities.

考虑以下问题：如果我的学习是由我关心的事情引导的，那么人工智能系统如何判断什么对我来说真正重要？当今的老师如何判断什么对我来说重要？

Consider the following questions: if my learning is steered by those things I care about, how does an AI system judge what really matters to me? How do teachers today judge what matters to me?

如果“联系”是我学习过程中不可或缺的一部分，即我与指导我学习的人或系统分享关注点，那么学生能有多自信地“联系”算法？如果正如我们在学校的经历所表明的那样，热情和激情是具有感染力的，那么是否存在真正的模拟呢？

If ‘a connection’ is integral to my learning process, i.e. that I share concerns with the person or system guiding my learning, how confidently can a student ‘connect’ to an algorithm? If, as our experience of school suggests, enthusiasm and passion are infectious, is there such a thing as an authentic simulation of this?

最后，许多学习都涉及从一个关注点推断出另一个关注点；例如：“如果你关心你的家人，你就应该关心安全——你考虑过在工作中受伤可能对他们造成的影响吗？”我们是否相信计算机程序可以或应该引导这个过程？

Finally, much learning involves the extrapolation of one concern from another; for example: ‘If you care about your family, you should care about safety – had you considered the impact that being injured at work might have on them?’ Do we believe that a computer program could, or should, steer this process?

今天，我们拥有可以进行音乐或购物推荐的算法，我们将其称为“人工智能”。

Today, we have algorithms that can make music or shopping recommendations that we describe as ‘AI’.

在大多数情况下，人工智能并不比“如果…那么”条件分支列表复杂多少。它们的力量来自于它们所基于的数据，而这本质上就是大数据如此重要的原因。此类算法会将您的个人资料与数百万其他类似的个人资料进行比较，并根据与您类似的人喜欢的内容提出建议。

For the most part AI is not much more complicated than a list of ‘If… then’ conditional branches. Their power comes from the data they are based on, and this – in essence – is why Big Data is a big deal. Such algorithms compare your profile to millions of other similar profiles, and make recommendations based on what people like you liked.

在教育环境中，您可以看到这种方法比教师指导的过程更具优势。教师本质上是在说：“这是我关心的，所以这也是你应该关心的”，而算法可以个性化，说这样的话：“我看到你喜欢恐龙和汽车。其他喜欢恐龙和汽车的人也对机器人感兴趣。你想了解更多有关机器人的信息吗？”

In an educational setting you can see how this might have advantages over an instructor-led process. An instructor is essentially saying: ‘This is what I care about, so this is what you should care about,’ whereas an algorithm can personalize, saying things like: ‘I can see you like dinosaurs and cars. Other people who liked dinosaurs and cars were also interested in robots. Would you like to learn more about robots?’

人工智能是否鼓励“忘记学习”？

Does AI encourage ‘unlearning’?

从某种意义上说，你可以看到人工智能关系似乎比人类关系更加个人化。人工智能会注意到我关心的每一个细节——甚至是我的鼠标光标停留在图像上的时间——并能据此进行个性化。人工智能从不急躁（除非我们希望它如此），而且似乎从不将自己置于我们面前——只是表面上如此。

In one sense, you can see that an AI relationship can seem far more personal than a human one. AI notices every small detail of the things I care about – down to the time my mouse cursor lingers on an image – and can personalize accordingly. AI is never impatient (unless we want it to be), and seems never to put itself before us – superficially.

但是，如果导师比地球上的任何人都了解你，但在必要时会毫不犹豫地将你解雇，你会怎么想？人工智能是笛卡尔精神病态的典型：虽然人工智能确实可以帮助我们学习，但它实际上忙于帮助我们忘记所学。毕竟，如果人工智能有答案，我们为什么要设计人工智能来帮助我们找出答案呢？减少我们对技术的依赖的商业必要性在哪里？

But how do you feel about the prospect of a mentor who knows you better than anyone else on the planet, but would dispatch you without a second thought should the need arise? AI is the epitome of Cartesian psychopathy: whilst AI could certainly help us learn, it is actually busy helping us unlearn. After all, why would we design AI to help us figure out the answer, when AI has the answer? Where is the commercial imperative to reduce our dependence on technology?

想象一下音乐推荐环境中的这种情况：人工智能可以告诉你和你一样的人喜欢的专辑并丰富你的音乐体验，或者它可以巧妙地促使你购买唱片公司本周付费推广的专辑。

Imagine this in a music recommendation context: AI could tell you about the album that people like you liked and enrich your musical experience, or it could subtly nudge you to purchase the album it has been paid by the record company to promote this week.

简而言之，虽然理论上人工智能可以设计为提供高度个性化的学习体验，但这会违背趋势。不道德的教育供应商可以利用它来推销他们的（无用的）模块，直到该模式被供应商所取代，他们拥有一个系统，告诉你该做什么，这样你就不必为模块烦恼了。想成为世界级的领导者吗？从 LeaderBot™ 购买黄金订阅，只需每月 15.99 美元，即可将您的决策质量提高 37% ^。5

In short, whilst AI could theoretically be designed to provide a highly personalized learning experience, that would buck the trend. It can be used by unscrupulous education vendors to push their (unhelpful) modules, until that model is overtaken by vendors with a system that tells you what to do so you don’t have to bother with the modules. Want to be a world-class leader? Purchase the Gold Subscription from LeaderBot™ for a proven 37 per cent improvement in the quality of your decisions at only $15.99 per month.⁵

在思考技术在学习和教育中的应用时，我们需要清醒地认识到理解的幻觉与理解之间的区别。现在，机器可以写一首关于爱情的诗，而这首诗可以被看作是人类的诗。它通过将数百万首关于爱情的人类诗歌平均化为一首可接受的诗歌来做到这一点。但这并不意味着它在某种程度上体验到了爱情。

In thinking about applications of technology to learning and education, we need to keep a clear head about the difference between the illusion of understanding and understanding. A machine can now write a poem about love that passes for a human poem. It does this by averaging millions of human poems about love into an acceptable composite. This does not mean that it experiences love to any degree, though.

毫无疑问，我们在计算机算法和机器学习的复杂程度方面取得了重大进展。然而，我们还没有向理解机器迈出一步。

There is no doubt that we have made significant advances in the sophistication of computer algorithms, and in machine learning. However, we have not taken a single step towards a machine that understands.

这是因为人类的理解是基于我们的反应——我们对狗和椅子等的反应——而机器没有任何接近人类的反应。机器可以计算十四行诗中的单词，但这与理解十四行诗不同。

This is because human understanding is based on our reactions – our reactions to dogs and chairs and so forth – and machines do not have anything approaching human reactions. A machine may count the words in a sonnet, but that is not the same as understanding a sonnet.

因此，尽管计算机可能擅长评分多项选择题，但它们无法评分论文：你无法通过计算字数来了解一个人的意图——事实上，任何真正原创的东西都必然会被忽略，因为它不符合过去的模式。

So while computers might be good for marking multiple-choice responses, they cannot grade essays: you cannot understand what a person intends by counting the words – indeed anything truly original would necessarily be ignored, because it wouldn’t match past patterns.

人工智能在统计解释方法方面天生就具有退步性。虽然它可以通过查看与你个人资料相似的个人并复制他们的选择来提出学习建议，但它无法理解你关心的是什么。

AI is inherently regressive when it comes to statistical approaches to interpretation. While it may be able to make learning recommendations by looking at individuals with a similar profile to you and copying their choices, it cannot understand what matters to you.

我们开始认为计算机有助于学习，因为——我们又一次认为整个过程就是将信息从一个地方转移到另一个地方（学习者的大脑）。从这个角度来看，计算机似乎可以弄清楚我们需要知道什么、什么时候需要，并在那一刻向我们提供恰到好处的“信息”。

We have fallen into thinking that computers will help with learning because – yet again – we have thought of the whole process as being about transferring information from one place to another (the learner’s brain). In this light, it looks as though computers might figure out what we need to know, when, and fire just the right bit of ‘stuff’ at us at that moment.

当然，在创建绩效指导系统方面可以取得进展，也就是说，系统可以使用简单的上下文数据来提供最有可能有用的资源，或建议最佳行动方案（如汽车中的 GPS）。虚拟环境（在一定程度上重现了体验的情感特征）也可以加速学习，这也是事实。但这两种方法的有效性都取决于一个人了解另一个人关心什么的过程。

Certainly progress can be made in creating performance guidance systems, that is to say systems that use simple contextual data to make available the resources that are most likely to be useful, or suggest the best course of action (like GPS in your car). It is also true that virtual environments – to the extent that they reproduce the emotional features of an experience – can accelerate learning. But both of these approaches will depend for their effectiveness on a process in which one person understands what another cares about.

技术在学习中的未来应用

Future applications of technology to learning

目前，技术在学习方面最有前景的应用（不同于绩效指导）是增强现实和虚拟现实。我们的学习体验通过亲身体验而加速：如果我们想让某人学习如何驾驶直升机，那么让他们真正在感觉真实的环境中练习驾驶直升机（即具有现实的情感后果）将加速学习。

At present the most promising application of technology to learning (as distinct from performance guidance) is augmented and virtual reality. Our learning experience is accelerated by first-hand experience: if we want someone to learn how to fly a helicopter then actually enabling them to practise doing that in an environment that feels real (i.e. has realistic affective consequences) will speed learning.

我们实际上并不需要人们相信模拟是真实的——只要它感觉真实就行。我的意思是，我们大脑更原始的情感反应会压倒你更复杂的反应——这就是为什么如果我在谈话中途流鼻血，你很可能会记住这一点，不管你是否是一名医疗专业人员。所以，如果你感觉自己正在坠落而亡——即使你知道自己在智力上不是这样——这种体验会更令人难忘。

We don’t actually need people to believe the simulation is real – just for it to feel real. What I mean is that our brain’s more primitive affective responses override your more sophisticated ones – this is why if I have a nosebleed mid-conversation you are likely to remember that, regardless of whether you are a medical professional. So if it feels as though you are plummeting to your death – even if you know you are not intellectually – the experience will be more memorable.

这种冲击力单靠叙事或者2D模拟是很难达到的，坐在电影院里和亲身体验是不一样的。

It is hard to accomplish this kind of impact via storytelling or 2D simulation alone. Sitting in a cinema is not the same as experiencing something first-hand.

记忆也是与情境相关的，因此 VR 让我们能够以数字化的方式取代课堂，按照我们的意愿将人们送往黑斯廷斯战役或古埃及。

Memory is also context-sensitive, so VR gives us a way to digitally retire the classroom, sending people to the Battle of Hastings or Ancient Egypt as we wish.

有趣的是，我们可以推测这会对评估方法产生怎样的影响；我们如何评估一个已经学会以裁缝的身份完全融入罗马社会的人？大概不会采用笔试。我们可以想象，模拟本身就是评估。

It’s interesting to speculate what that would do for assessment methodologies; how would we assess someone who had learned to fully integrate into Roman society as a dressmaker? Presumably not with a written exam. One imagines that the simulation would itself be the assessment.

当然，如果没有投资，这些梦幻般的可能性都无法实现，而投资似乎更有可能来自那些对现状有既得利益的公司，而不是机构。这反过来又将决定应用范围：你可以很容易地想象，军队将创造一个环境，在这个环境中，士兵从被挑选的模拟环境过渡到他们真正参与战斗的环境，这几乎是天衣无缝的。

Of course none of these fantastical possibilities will be realized without investment, and it seems more likely that this will come from corporations rather than institutions with a vested interest in the status quo. This, in turn, will determine the range of applications: you can easily imagine the military creating environments in which there is a more or less seamless transition from simulations in which soldiers are being selected, to one in which they are actually fighting battles.

但动物园管理可能是一个非常不同的事情；动物园是小型的、独立的实体——他们可能最好坚持一种工作安排制度，让人们能够体验真实的动物园生活。

But zookeeping might be a very different matter; zoos are small, independent entities – they would probably be better off sticking with a system of work placements where people can experience the real thing.

这种体验式生态系统将成为“混合”学习环境的一个特色——真实学徒制与虚拟模拟相结合。实际工作以物理和数字方式进行。

This experiential ecosystem will become a feature of the ‘hybrid’ learning landscape – real apprenticeships dovetailed with virtual simulations. Real work carried out physically and digitally.

回到道德问题上，我远比机器人更有信心，狗的行为会更合乎道德。为什么？狗的设计与我们相似；它是一种能感受到痛苦、必须进食和排泄的生物。它是一种会生育的生物，会表现出对后代的关爱。它是一种似乎能感受到快乐甚至羞耻的生物。

Returning to ethics, I have far more confidence that a dog will behave ethically than a robot ever will. Why? A dog is designed similarly to us; it is a creature that feels pain, must eat and defecate. It is a creature that gives birth, that shows every sign of loving its offspring. It is a creature that seems to experience happiness and even shame.

研究表明，与许多动物（包括鸟类和老鼠）一样，⁶只狗具有公平感并富有同情心。我可以确信动物具有道德感，只要我能确信动物与我有同样的感受。

Studies suggest that, in common with a wide variety of creatures (including birds and rats),⁶ dogs have a sense of fairness and experience empathy. I can be confident that a creature is ethical to the extent that I can be confident that a creature feels as I do.

当然，有一种生物让我的感觉与其他人不同：那就是我自己。

Of course there is one creature about which I feel differently to all others: myself.

问题：您愿意购买一朵水仙花来支持癌症研究慈善机构吗？

Question: would you buy a single daffodil to support a Cancer Research charity?

在 Nicholas Epley 和 David Dunning 进行的一项研究中，83% 的学生表示他们会买一束花来支持癌症研究慈善机构，而他们估计只有（平均）56% 的同学会这样做。当有机会时，只有 43% 的人真正买了一束花^。7

In a piece of research conducted by Nicholas Epley and David Dunning, 83 per cent of students said they would buy a flower to support a cancer research charity, and that they estimated only (on average) 56 per cent of their peers would do so. When the opportunity arose, only 43 per cent actually bought a flower.⁷

每个人都是自己故事中的英雄。囚犯也不例外。另一项研究发现，除了守法之外，囚犯对自己每一项亲社会特质的评价都高于平均水平^。8

Everyone is the hero of their own story. Even prisoners. A separate study found that prisoners rated themselves as above average for every single pro-social trait except for being law-abiding.⁸

目前有大量研究涉及我们在自我评估中表现出的偏见。总体而言，主要结论是，除了某些特殊情况（如临床抑郁症）外，我们对自己（关于我们的未来、我们的能力、我们的价值）的感觉一直比我们客观理性时的感觉要好得多。

There is now a vast body of research relating to the biases that we exhibit in our assessments of ourselves. Overall the headline is that, except in some specific circumstances (such as clinical depression) we consistently feel far better about ourselves – about our future, our abilities, our worthiness – than we should if we were objective and rational.

实际上，需要感觉自己是好的并且做正确的事构成了许多社交互动的基础。我们甚至有一个表达：社会认可。人们八卦他们所做的事情，并希望听到人们说：“你做的对！”或“我也会做同样的事情！”反过来，人们倾向于与志同道合的人在一起（无论是在网络上还是在现实生活中）。

In practice, the need to feel that one is good and doing the right thing forms the basis of much social interaction. We even have an expression for it: social validation. People gossip about the thing that they did, and expect to hear people say: ‘You did the right thing!’ or ‘I would have done exactly the same!’ In turn, people tend to surround themselves (whether online or in real life) with like-minded people.

这种“相同即安全”的偏见保护了故事中的英雄（你）永远不会觉得自己做出了错误的决定。安吉拉·巴恩斯（Angela Bahns）将这种在友谊和人际关系中寻求相似性的愿望描述为“如此普遍，如此广泛，以至于可以将其描述为一种心理默认”，她是一项研究的合著者，该研究表明我们对志趣相投的渴望是根深蒂固的。9^他们继续暗示你：“[…]试图创造一个让你感到舒适的社交世界”，强烈暗示了这种行为的情感基础。

This ‘same is safe’ bias protects the hero of the story (you) from ever having to feel like they made a bad decision. This desire to seek out similarity in friendship and relationships is described as ‘so common and so widespread on so many dimensions that it could be described as a psychological default’ by Angela Bahns, co-author of a study that suggests our desire for like-mindedness is hard-wired.⁹ They go on to suggest you are: ‘[…] trying to create a social world where you feel comfortable’, strongly suggesting an affective basis for the behaviour.

难道就不可能讲道理吗？

Is it impossible to be reasonable?

我想重新讨论一下自本书一开始就可能困扰您的一个问题，我当时认为人类是情感动物，而不是理性动物，思考和感觉之间的区别是一种错觉。您心中的问题可能是：“这是否意味着不可能讲道理？”或：“您是说没有对错之分吗？”

I want to revisit a concern that may have unsettled you since the outset of the book, where I argued that humans are emotional, not rational, creatures, and that the divide between thinking and feeling is an illusion. The question on your mind may be something like: ‘Does this mean that it is impossible to be reasonable?’ or: ‘Are you saying that there is no right or wrong?’

在《魔鬼经济学》播客的一集中，斯蒂芬·杜布纳与瑞士纳沙泰尔大学行为生态学教授雷杜安·巴沙里进行了交谈。巴沙里研究了一种名为清洁濑鱼的鱼，这是一种在珊瑚礁中很常见的小鱼。

In an episode of his Freakonomics podcast, Stephen Dubner talks to Redouan Bshary, a professor of behavioural ecology at the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland. Bshary studied a type of fish called Cleaner Wrasse, a small fish common among coral reefs.

正如它们的名字所暗示的那样，清洁濑鱼靠清理其他鱼类为生——吃掉它们身上的寄生虫和死鳞。Bshary 发现，清洁濑鱼遵守复杂的经济规律——例如，为游客提供优惠待遇，而不是为居民提供优惠待遇，并根据客户享受的“可选性”水平调整自己的行为。简而言之，它们的行为就像精明的企业家一样。

As their name suggests, Cleaner Wrasse make their living out of cleaning other fish – eating the parasites and dead scales from their bodies. What Bshary discovered, is that the Cleaner Wrasse obey complex laws of economics – for example providing preferential treatment for visitors vs residents, and adjusting their behaviour according to the level of ‘optionality’ that their client enjoyed. In short, they were behaving like savvy entrepreneurs.

现在没有人认为这些鱼是经济学家——但它们的行为符合经济理论。同样，这些鱼并不了解全部经济理论（可以肯定地说），但它们运用了与它们的生活相关的法则。

Now no one is suggesting that the fish were actually economists – but they were acting in accordance with economic theory. Equally, the fish were not aware of the totality of economic theory (one can safely assume), but employed the laws that were relevant to their lives.

换句话说，尽管鱼遵守经济规律，并在一定程度上将其内化，但经济独立于鱼本身而存在。我们可以将这种描述应用于它们的行为。人类也是如此。理性描述了一套存在于人类之外的法则——逻辑、数学等等。人类是纯粹的情感动物，但这些情感可以按照理性行事。

In other words, though the fish were obeying the laws of economics – and had to some degree internalized them – economics exists independently of the fish themselves. It’s a description that we can apply to their behaviour. The same is true of humans. Reason describes a set of laws – logic, mathematics and so on – that exist outside of them. Humans are purely emotional creatures, but those emotions can be made to behave in accordance with reason.

就道德而言，“公平”不仅仅是我们强烈感受到的东西，而且——有点像经济学——描述了世界的一个特征。我们的感受可以与公平相对应，就像它们可以与理性相一致一样。话虽如此，我们很少非常理性——而且通常非常不合逻辑。

When it comes to ethics, ‘fairness’ is not merely something we feel strongly about, but – a bit like economics – describes a feature of the world. Our feelings can be made to correspond to what is fair, just as they can be made to conform to reason. That said, we’re rarely very reasonable – and normally terribly illogical.

例如，普通人可能有一些基本的数学知识——他们很可能知道“与”和“或”语句之间的区别。但就我们所知的逻辑和数学整体而言，他们的行为只符合其中的一小部分。就像我们的鱼一样。

Your average person might, for example, have some basic maths – they most likely know the difference between an ‘and’ and an ‘or’ statement. But in terms of the totality of logic and mathematics as we know it, they are only organized to behave in line with a tiny fraction of it. Much like our fish.

现在，哲学家们往往会纠结于那些独立于人类思维而存在的事物的存在状态，但在实践中，我们承认数学和逻辑的独立存在。否则，我们为什么要将载有数学定义的旅行者号宇宙飞船送入未知世界，除非我们假设这些定义独立于人类而存在？

Now, philosophers tend to struggle with the existential status of things that exist independently of the human mind, but in practice we recognize the independent existence of mathematics and logic. Why else would we send a Voyager spacecraft into the unknown containing mathematical definitions, unless we presumed that these exist independently of human beings?

因此，“理性”描述的是独立于人类而存在的模式，就像经济学独立于我们的濑鱼而存在一样。两者都表达了世界上事物之间的逻辑关系，这些关系可以由宇宙历史中不同地点和时间的不同物种来描述。那么为什么会有这种混淆呢？

So ‘reason’ describes patterns that exist independently to humans, just as economics exists independently to our Cleaner Wrasse. Both things express logical relationships between things in the world, that could be described by different species at different locations and times in the universe’s history. So why the confusion?

之所以产生这种混淆，是因为虽然裂唇鱼不太可能对“经济学”产生感觉，但人类对“理性”的概念却有情感反应。由于我们不仅能对正在经历的事情做出反应，还能对想象中的经历做出反应，所以我们也能想象出我们喜欢的规则，我们甚至会爱上数学。用诗意的方式表达，我们可以把我们的情感弯曲成方程式的形状，就像我们可以把柳枝弯曲成心形（或椅子形）一样。

The confusion comes about because whilst Cleaner Wrasse are unlikely to have feelings about ‘economics’, humans do have an affective response towards the concept of ‘reason’. Because of our ability to have a reaction not just to what we’re experiencing, but imaginary experiences, we can also imagine rules that we like, and we can even fall in love with mathematics. Expressed poetically, we can bend our emotions into the shape of an equation, much as we might bend a willow branch into the shape of a heart (or a chair).

因此，尽管我们仍然像濑鱼一样是完全情绪化的生物，但这样说并不意味着会带来某种可怕的相对论末日，在那种末日中，我可以随心所欲地说“2 + 2 = 龙虾”。不，我们的情绪仍然可以符合理性，也可以不符合理性，就像鱼的行为可以符合经济规律一样——而且与鱼不同的是，我们可以意识到这一点。

So though we remain – like the Cleaner Wrasse – thoroughly emotional creatures, saying so does not usher in some dreadful relativistic apocalypse where I can say ‘2 + 2 = lobster’ if I feel like it. No, our sentiments can still conform to reason or not, just as the fish’s behaviour can conform to economic law – and unlike the fish, we can be aware of it.

1895 年，法国知识分子古斯塔夫·勒庞在其著作《乌合之众》中写道：“群体的感情往往过于夸张，过度的情绪只会打动他们。” ¹⁰今天，在营销算法冷酷的野心推动下，我们正目睹情绪被夸大和耗尽到前所未有的程度。

In 1895, in his book The Crowd, the French intellectual Gustave Le Bon wrote: ‘Given to exaggeration in its feelings, a crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments.’¹⁰ Today, we are witnessing the exaggeration and exhaustion of sentiment to an unprecedented degree, spurred on by the dispassionate ambition of marketing algorithms.

看来我们比以往任何时候都更需要理性的声音，而我破坏它就是火上浇油。

It may seem that we need the voice of reason more than ever, and that in undermining it I am throwing fuel on a fire.

社交媒体的影响

The impact of social media

我们今天面临的问题不是缺乏理性。仔细审视合理的论据总会发现隐藏的议程——这反过来又会引起怀疑。

The problem we face today is not a lack of reason. A closer inspection of reasonable argument invariably reveals a hidden agenda – and this in turn incites suspicion.

因此，问题中的平衡点不是在强烈的感觉和逻辑论证之间取得的：相反，我们需要用对抽象概念和可能的未来的反应来抵消我们的即时反应。社交媒体带来的困难反而是情感短视的结果：互联网让我们关注即时的感觉，而我们忘记考虑我们对更遥远的可能性的感受。一切都是“现在！现在！现在！”

So the balance in question is not to be struck between strong feeling and logical argument: instead we need to offset our immediate reactions with the ones we have towards abstract concepts and possible futures. The difficulty social media presents is instead a consequence of affective myopia: the internet focuses us on immediate sensations, and we forget to consider how we feel about more distant possibilities. Everything is ‘Now! Now! Now!’

解决办法不是更理性的辩论，而是更具想象力和开放性的辩论。这种野心与当前的趋势背道而驰，媒体在一场怪诞的情感军备竞赛中争相追求更极端的表达。新闻更令人震惊，电影更令人震惊，性表达更公开，立场更根深蒂固。我们沉迷于即时性。

The cure is not more reasonable debate, but debates with more imagination and openness. This ambition flies in the face of current trends, where media vies for ever more extreme expression in a grotesque affective arms race. News is more shocking, movies more mind-blowing, sexual expression more overt, positions more extremely entrenched. We are intoxicated with immediacy.

教师们担心自己无法扭转这种趋势。尽管我们的世界已经变得越来越充满情感，但课堂仍然异常枯燥。尽管在教育实践方面取得了一些进步，但很多时间仍然花在坐着听别人谈论你不感兴趣的事情上。

This is the tide that teachers fear they cannot turn. Whilst our world has become exponentially more affectively charged, the classroom has remained extraordinarily dull. Whilst some progress has been made in educational practices, a lot of time is still spent sitting, listening to someone talk about something you are not interested in.

这并不是说学生的注意力下降了——这个想法很荒谬——只是，50年前，学生的注意力集中的时间可能是爬树，而现在则是在一分钟内浏览 100 个搞笑或令人震惊的表情包。

It is not that students’ attention spans have dropped – that’s a ridiculous idea – it is just that 50 years ago the alternative might have been climbing a tree, where now it is flipping through 100 hilarious or shocking memes in a minute.

当谈到学习和道德时，这种趋势并不是我们的朋友：如果我们希望做出更好的道德决策，我们必须找到一种方法来逆流而上，这种情感脱敏正在将我们所有人卷入其中。如果我们想学习，我们必须与技术让我们的生活更轻松的欲望作斗争，以换取我们的能力。

When it comes to learning and ethics, the trend is not our friend: if we wish to make better ethical decisions we must each find a way to swim against the current of emotional desensitization that is sweeping us all downstream. If we wish to learn, we must battle technology’s desire to make our lives easier in exchange for our capability.

我们必须继续做出非常人性化的决定：我们必须花时间去了解人们作为个体，我的意思是他们关心的事情，并且在设计学习体验时，我们必须敏锐地意识到我们自己的动机并谨慎判断在多大程度上挑战人们，并在我们成长的过程中监控情感成本。

We must continue to make very human decisions: we must take the time to understand people as individuals, by which I mean the things that they care about, and in designing learning experiences we must have an acute awareness of our own motivations and make careful judgements regarding how far to challenge people, monitoring the emotional cost of growth as we go.

作为学习体验设计师，我们必须与越来越多、越来越强大的情感意义来源竞争，以吸引学习者的注意力。

As learning experience designers we must compete with ever more numerous and powerful sources of affective significance that compete for learners’ attention.

“我们常常拒绝接受一个想法，仅仅是因为表达这个想法的语气让我们感到不悦。”

‘We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.’

弗里德里希·尼采

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

我们热衷于研究个体差异：人格心理学中充斥着各种类型和特征的分类。流行心理学杂志充斥着各种淫秽的奇闻异事。在可预见的未来，“找出你的性格类型！”仍将是可靠的点击诱饵。

We love to obsess over individual differences: personality psychology abounds with categorizations of types and traits. Popular psychology magazines trade on salacious tales of oddity. ‘Find out your personality type!’ will remain dependable click-bait for the foreseeable future.

但只有我们的群体才是不同的、多样化的：我们倾向于认为其他物种，甚至其他种族，看起来和行为都大同小异。这种效应被称为外群同质性错觉。当我们了解一个群体时，这种错觉就会消失，因此，随着我们彼此了解并认识到每个个体都是独一无二的，我们对彼此作为个体的感觉可能会发展——就像我们对待我们自己的群体一样。

But it is only our group that are different and diverse: we tend to see other species, even other ethnic groups, as looking and behaving much the same. This effect is called the illusion of outgroup homogeneity. It disappears as we get to know a group, so our sense of each other as individuals probably develops as we get to know each other and recognize each individual as unique – in the way that we have done with our own group.

随着时间的推移，我们开始认为每个人都是独特的、不同的，都有自己的动机和故事情节。

In time, we start to see each person as distinct and different, having their own motivations and storyline.

尽管如此，让人感到沮丧的是，让人感到兴奋的因素很简单：从众。近看我们都是不同的；远看我们都是绵羊。就像蜂巢里的蜜蜂一样与众不同。

Despite all this, what makes people tick is depressingly straightforward: conformity. Close up we are all different: at a sufficient distance, we are sheep. As distinct as bees in a hive.

一致性

Conformity

在任何特定情况下，绝大多数人都会做周围人在 99% 的时间里做的事情。当我们逐渐了解人们时，我们会对他们行为中的细微差异着迷——而忽略了他们之间大量的共同点。

In any given situation the vast majority of people will do whatever the people around them are doing 99 per cent of the time. As we get to know people, we obsess over the minor variations in their behaviour – and overlook the vast stretches of commonality between them.

作为一名大学讲师，我教过数千名学生。一年中，我认识了许多仰面朝天的学生，他们个性独特。但没有一个学生站起来刷牙。讲座中途。事实上，在大部分时间里，这些独特的人都静静地坐着做笔记。在某一周里，他们可能做的最了不起的事情就是在我讲话时打断我。

As a college lecturer I taught thousands of students. During the course of the year I would get to know many unique personalities among the rows of upturned faces. But not once did a student get up and brush their teeth mid-lecture. In fact, for the vast proportion of the time every single one of these unique individuals sat quietly, taking notes. In a given week the most remarkable thing they might do would be to interrupt me while I was talking.

我们这个物种依赖于从众，以及让我们保持原状的机制。我们本能地是群居动物，彼此深切关心。你对我的看法实际上改变了我的生物学。这种共同特征使我们比可能更聪明、更个性的人科动物表现得更好：我们可能不是最聪明或最强大的人类物种，但我们成群狩猎并分享战利品。对尼安德特人头骨的研究表明，他们的大脑比我们的大得多。

Our species depends on conformity, and the mechanisms that keep us in place. We are instinctively herd animals, deeply concerned about each other. What you think of me literally alters my biology. This shared trait has allowed us to outperform potentially smarter, more individualistic hominids: we may not have been the brightest or strongest homo species, but we hunt in packs and share our spoils. Studies of Neanderthal skulls show that their brains were larger than ours by a significant degree.

然而大脑大小并不是一切；有些生物（例如海豚和大象）的大脑比我们的大，但似乎并不更聪明。

Brain size isn’t everything though; some creatures (such as dolphins and elephants) have brains that are larger than ours but don’t seem smarter.

一个关键的区别是幼态持续的程度：人类比其他任何生物都生来就拥有相对不发达的大脑，而我们延长的学习时间恰恰说明了我们的智力潜力。对尼安德特人头骨的研究表明，他们的大脑发育时间比我们的更长，这表明他们的学习能力更强。

A key distinction is the extent of neoteny: more than any other creature humans are born with relatively underdeveloped brains and it is our extended period of learning that is illustrative of our intellectual potential. Studies of Neanderthal skulls show that their brains took even longer to develop than ours, suggesting an even greater capacity for learning.

标准解释是，它们的视觉皮层，而不是前额叶皮层，在很大程度上解释了大脑大小的差异——但这很可能只是一种方便的事后合理化，因为很少有人解释它们可能拥有的额外心理能力。可能只是因为作为更强大、更聪明的猿类，它们不需要成群狩猎。也许这意味着不那么强调与社交互动和同理心相关的认知能力，也许这些能力是文化出现的先决条件之一。

The standard explanation is that their visual cortex, not their prefrontal cortex, accounted in large part for the difference in brain size – but it may well be that this is little more than a convenient post-rationalization since few accounts are offered of the additional mental capabilities they would have possessed. It may just be that as stronger, smarter, apes they had less need to hunt in groups. Perhaps this meant less of an emphasis on cognitive abilities associated with social interaction and empathy, and perhaps these abilities were part of the prerequisite for culture to emerge.

和其他生物一样，我们会用情感来编码我们的体验——但其他人的反应在其中起着不成比例的巨大作用。例如，我们大脑中有很大一部分专门用于处理面部表情。我们可以通过小光点识别人类的步态，甚至可以推断出那个人的感受。我们很高兴看到某人对某事做出反应的视频。

Like other creatures we encode our experience affectively – but other people’s reactions play a disproportionately large part in that. We have a big chunk of our brain dedicated to processing faces, for example. We can identify a human gait from nothing more than small dots of light, even draw inferences about how that person is feeling. We are happy to watch a video of someone reacting to something.

对此的传统解释是，这全都与检测他人的意图有关，但最近的研究表明，我们很难从面部表情中识别出撒谎老手。因此，虽然意图是其中的一部分，但我们也在试图判断其他人对他们所经历的事情的反应，最重要的是对我们所做的事情的反应。

The classical explanation for this is that it is all about detecting intent in others, but recent research has shown we can struggle to identify the practised liar from their facial expressions, so whilst intent is part of it, we are also just looking to gauge other people’s reactions – to the things they experience, and most importantly to the things we do.

内心的情感

Emotion at heart

我们倾向于认为情绪是我们对世界的感知之上的东西，而不是我们理解世界的方式的根本。这是我们感知世界的方式。但这种做法存在很大问题。我之前提到过，孩子们会自然而然地将情感和意向性归因于他们周围的物体——这是他们感知事物的方式中根深蒂固的。

We have a tendency to think of emotion as something that is overlaid onto our perceptions of the world, rather than as fundamental to the way in which we perceive the world. But there is something very wrong with this. I mentioned earlier that children naturally attribute sentiment and intentionality to objects around them – that this is hard wired into the way they perceive things.

作为成年人，我们可能知道树木不在乎我们踢它们，但我们仍然完全根据感觉来评估我们周围的世界（即使我们是在逻辑上思考，我们很快就会看到）。例如，我经常对衣架生气，我确信它们每天都在惹我生气。

And as adults, we may learn that trees don’t care if we kick them, but we continue to assess the world around us entirely on the basis of how it feels to us (even when we are thinking logically, as we will see shortly). I frequently get angry with coat-hangers, for example, which I am convinced are out to annoy me on a daily basis.

看看弗里茨·海德和安妮·齐美尔的以下实验。弗里茨和安妮制作了一部短片（约两分半钟），主角是两个三角形和一个圆形。在他们的动画短片中（您可以在 YouTube 上观看），所有三个几何电影明星都在一个矩形内来回移动。然后，观看影片的人被问及他们所看到的内容。

Consider the following experiment by Fritz Heider and Anne Simmel. Fritz and Anne created a short film (around two and a half minutes) starring two triangles and a circle. In their animated short – which you can watch for yourself on YouTube – all three geometrical movie-stars moved around and in and out of a rectangle. People watching the film were then asked questions about what they had witnessed.

他们发现，几乎所有参与者都是有意且情绪化地解读这部电影的，他们毫不费力地描述了那些在几何学上处于劣势的演员的动机和情绪。事实上，对于普通人来说，很难以其他方式看待它。在后来的研究中，他们发现学龄前儿童会讲述非常相似的故事来讲述正在发生的事情。

What they found was that almost all of their participants interpreted the film intentionally and emotionally, having no trouble at all describing the motivations and sentiments of the geometrically disadvantaged actors. In fact, for the general population it was very hard for people to see it otherwise. In later research, it was found that pre-school children would tell very similar stories about what is going on.

这是一项有趣的发现，因为它表明情感解释不是我们后来学会应用于周围世界的东西，而是从一开始就“根深蒂固”的东西。一些哲学家希望将人类视为自然科学家，利用理性的力量来开发和测试有关世界上事件之间因果关系的假设。

It’s an interesting finding, because it suggests that an affective interpretation is not something that we later learn to apply to the world around us, but something ‘baked in’ from the outset. Some philosophers have wanted to see humans as natural scientists, using the power of reason to develop and test hypotheses regarding causal relationships between events in the world.

大卫休谟持这种观点，甚至今天也有人认为我们的大脑是某种科学计算器，不断提出和测试事件之间的逻辑关系。但这只是哲学家梦想成为理性的神——实际上人们并不是这样工作的；年幼的孩子不会为他们所见的东西寻找理性的解释——事实上，他们看到的东西他们会立即进行有意识的解释。

David Hume took this view, and even today there are people who believe our brains to be some manner of scientific calculator, constantly proposing and testing logical relationships between events. But this is just philosophers dreaming of being rational gods – in practice people don’t work this way; young children are not looking for rational explanations of what they see – indeed, what they see they immediately interpret intentionally.

我们的预测是意图预测：那块石头想要滚下悬崖，那个人想要偷我的食物，等等。当然，预测未来对你的大脑来说很重要，但它并不是以某种合乎逻辑的贝叶斯统计方式来做到这一点，相反，它更像是预感：你知道事情会是什么样的，因为它们过去的感觉。

Our predictions are predictions of intent: that rock wants to roll down the cliff, that person wants to steal my food, etc. Of course it’s important for your brain to predict the future, but it doesn’t do this in some logical Bayesian statistical fashion, instead it’s more like premonition: you know how things are going to feel because of how they felt in the past.

即使作为一个成年人，无论你经历了怎样的条件反射，你偶尔也会亲身经历这样的事情：你用头撞到橱柜门上，门一直开着，你会生气地把它关上或咒骂它。本能地，你会对橱柜门感到恼火。你的车坏了，你会对它大喊大叫。理性地讲，你知道门不是“要撞你”，车也不是要破坏你——但这不是你的本能反应。我们总是对无生命的物体感到恼火，在这些时刻，我们真正的工作方式就会浮出水面。

Even as an adult – despite all your conditioning – you will occasionally experience this first hand: you bang your head against a cupboard door that has been left open and you slam it shut angrily or swear at it. Instinctively, you are annoyed with the cupboard door. Your car breaks down and you yell at it. Rationally you know that the door was not ‘out to get you’, or the car undermining you – but this is not your instinctive response. We get annoyed with inanimate objects all the time, and in these moments our true way of working surfaces.

平衡理论

Balance theory

根据我们的反应、根据它给我们带来的感受来对世界进行编码，有助于我们理解事物在我们头脑中的联系方式。

Encoding the world in terms of our reactions, in terms of how it makes us feel, helps us to understand the way that things are linked in our minds.

想象一下你曾经非常亲密的一位老朋友——一个你从学生时代就没见过的人。现在想象一下你意外地遇到了他们。你很高兴再次见到他们，并邀请他们来吃晚饭。

Imagine an old friend – someone you haven’t seen since school days – with whom you were very close. Now imagine you bump into them unexpectedly. You are delighted to see them again and suggest they come round to dinner.

晚餐时，你惊恐地发现，他们的政治观点现在与你截然相反。他们关于女性选择权和身份政治的一些言论让你感到很不舒服。最后，你得知他们认为大麻应该合法化——而你非常反对任何形式的娱乐性吸毒。

Over dinner you learn, to your horror, that their politics are now diametrically opposed to yours. Some of the remarks they make about a woman’s right to choose and about identity politics make you quite uncomfortable. Finally, you learn that they believe that cannabis should be legalized – whilst you are very much opposed to recreational drug use of any kind.

晚上结束时，你向他们告别，而你却开始思考自己的困境：如果你继续与他们保持联系，你会觉得自己正在损害自己的价值观；如果你不这样做，你会觉得自己背弃了一段重要的关系。

At the end of the evening you bid them farewell, and you are left to ponder your dilemma: if you stay in touch with them you will feel like you are compromising your values; if you don’t you will feel like you have turned your back on an important relationship.

弗里茨·海德对这种情况也发表了一些有趣的看法。他注意到，当我们对世界的某些部分有不一致的感觉时，我们会试图“平衡”它们。他将自己的理论称为“平衡理论”。描绘他的理论的最佳方式是将其描绘成一个三角形；想象一下你、你的朋友和大麻存在于三角形的三个角上。

Fritz Heider also had something interesting to say about this kind of situation. He noticed that when we have mismatched feelings about parts of our world, that we try to ‘balance’ them. He called his theory ‘balance theory’. The best way to picture his theory is as a triangle; imagine that you, your friend, and cannabis exist at the three corners of the triangle.

三角形的边现在代表了对连接点的态度。你喜欢你的朋友（所以这是一种积极的态度），他们喜欢大麻（所以是另一个积极的联系）——但你对大麻持消极态度。用弗里茨的术语来说，这个三角形是“不平衡的”，因为你对相关事物（你的朋友和大麻）的态度是相互冲突的。

The sides of the triangle now represent attitudes towards the connected points. You like your friend (so that’s a positive attitude), they like cannabis (so another positive link) – but you have a negative attitude towards cannabis. In Fritz’s terminology the triangle is ‘unbalanced’, because your attitudes towards related items (your friend and cannabis) are in conflict.

你会体验到心理学家所说的“认知失调”：一种不舒服的感觉，你渴望解决它。你可以用两种方式来解决这个问题：你可以决定放弃与朋友的关系，承认他们“不再是你以前认识的那个人”——或者你可以决定大麻也许并没有那么糟糕。

You experience something that psychologists have called ‘cognitive dissonance’: an uncomfortable feeling that you are motivated to resolve. You can do that in two ways: you can decide to let go of the relationship with your friend, conceding that they are ‘not the person you used to know’ – or you can decide that maybe cannabis isn’t all that bad after all.

弗里茨提出，如果情感价（我们对事物的感受）平衡，情绪也是平衡的。

Fritz proposed that sentiments are balanced if the affect valence (how we feel about things) balances out.

这是一个非常实用的日常模型：例如，如果你想向某人推销某样东西，那么先让他们喜欢你是个不错的主意。或者，为什么要花费精力，而你可以使用社交媒体中的一些数据来找出他们已经喜欢的人，然后让他们喜欢的人为你的产品代言？

This is a very useful model for everyday use: for example if you are trying to sell something to someone, it’s not a bad idea to get them to like you first. Alternatively, why expend the effort, when you could just use some data from social media to find out who they already like, then get the person they like to endorse your product?

它也非常方便学习背景。作为一名年轻的心理学讲师，我的大学发现了​​我对技术的兴趣，并迅速招募我去教授成人技术入门晚间课程。当时互联网才刚刚兴起，中年人对技术持怀疑态度，普遍对它感到困惑。人们不知道如何使用鼠标（尽管这些天鼠标似乎正在消亡）。

It is also very handy for learning contexts. As a young psychology lecturer my college discovered my interest in technology and promptly conscripted me into teaching an Introduction to Technology evening class for adults. This was at a time when the internet was new and middle-aged people were suspicious of technology and generally baffled by it all. People didn’t know how to use a mouse (although those seem to be dying out these days).

我发现让某人喜欢电脑的方法是找到他们喜欢的其他东西——比如园艺——然后在互联网上找到他们最喜欢的话题的页面、社区、视频等。人们会追随他们喜欢的东西的踪迹，就像汉塞尔和格莱特在去女巫家的路上捡糖果一样（我可能记错了这个故事，但我更喜欢我的版本）。

I discovered that the way to get someone to like the computer was to find something else they liked – say gardening – then find pages, communities, videos, etc on their favourite topic scattered around the internet. People would follow the trail of stuff they liked like Hansel and Gretel picking up sweets on the way to the witch’s house (I may have mis-remembered that story, but I prefer my version here).

有趣的是，我们最根本的动机是协调我们的感受；我们希望对世界感到满意。这与理性或逻辑无关。您可能看到我们对现实的感知与现实本身之间存在直接的相似之处：只要现实中没有任何东西“破坏”我们的心理模型，生活就是美好的。心理学家让·皮亚杰将这种状态称为“平衡”。

It’s interesting to note that our fundamental motivation is to harmonize how we feel; we want to feel good about the world. It’s not about reason or logic. You can probably see an immediate parallel between our perceptions of reality, and reality itself: life is good, so long as nothing in reality ‘unbalances’ our mental model. The psychologist Jean Piaget called this state ‘equilibrium’.

吉恩的想法（以及他之后的许多发展心理学家的想法）是，这与图式有关——图式是我们随着时间的推移建立起来的心理世界模型。最终，我们会达到一个点，即世界上发生的事情符合我们的预期，而那时我们不再有学习或适应的动力。这就是我将学习描述为一种稳态机制的意思。

Jean’s thinking (and that of many developmental psychologists after him) was that this had something to do with schemas – mental models of the world which we build up over time. Eventually we reach a point where what happens in the world conforms to what we are expecting, and at that point we are no longer motivated to learn or adapt. This is what I mean when I describe learning as a homeostatic mechanism.

然而，吉恩的解释存在一个很大的问题：心理学家从来没有能够弄清楚这些图式是什么，或者它们是由什么构成的，以及如何与人类的行为方式相对应。

There is a big problem with Jean’s account, though: psychologists were never able to figure out what those schemas are, or what they are made of, in a way which corresponds to how humans behave.

我的观点是：心理学家所谓的图式实际上是一种复杂的相互关联的情感反应模式，当我们经历某个事件或对该事件的记忆时，这些情感反应就会被激活。我同意心理学家所说的，我们在心理上描绘世界，我们确实这样做了。情感上是如此。我们的思维地图是感性的，而不是语义的。如果你在设计学习，这一点很重要；我们不是在联系相关的想法，而是在联系相关的感受。

What I am proposing is this: what psychologists have called schemas are in fact a complex pattern of interrelated affective reactions that are activated when we experience an event, or a memory of that event. I agree that we map the world mentally, as psychologists have suggested, just that we do so affectively. Our mental maps are sentimental, not semantic. This is important to know if you are designing learning; we are not linking related ideas, we are linking related feelings.

你可能会指出，我们常常对事物有矛盾的感受，而且我们对世界的心理模型总是与现实不完全对应，这让你想知道为什么我们没有不断经历认知失调。

You might point out that quite often we have contradictory feelings about things, and invariably our mental model of the world doesn’t exactly correspond to reality, leaving you wondering why we are not constantly experiencing cognitive dissonance.

答案是，只要我们不同时体验到这些矛盾的感觉，我们就可以接受。例如，你可能反对移民，但也是圣经的粉丝。如果有人对好撒玛利亚人的寓言发表尖锐的评论，这可能会让你感到不舒服，并促使你想出一个理由来说明为什么这个建议在这种情况下不适用。

The answer is that we are fine with conflicting feelings, so long as we don’t experience them concurrently. For example you might be anti-immigration, but also a fan of the Bible. If someone makes pointed remarks about the parable of the Good Samaritan, that might make you feel uncomfortable and motivate you to come up with a reason why that advice doesn’t apply in this context.

总而言之，我们对世界的体验不仅是由我们对事物的情绪反应形成的，我们世界中事物之间的关系也是由我们对它们的感受决定的。

In summary, not only is our experience of the world formed from our emotional reactions to things, the relationship between things in our world is determined by our feelings towards them.

情感世界

The world as sentiment

简要回顾一下维特根斯坦的错误：人们普遍认为世界是“事物的总体”，逻辑描述了它们之间的关系，但更准确地说，世界是我们所体验到的所有感觉的总体。我们想说：“是的——但感觉总是与事物有关！”，但这对我们没有帮助，因为我们只能根据事物在我们身上引起的反应来体验事物。我们没有反应的事物是看不见的。

Returning briefly to Wittgenstein’s error: it has become popular to think of the world as ‘the totality of things’, and logic as describing the relationship between them, but it would be more accurate to think of the world as the totality of feelings we experience. We want to say: ‘Yes – but feelings are always about things!’, but this won’t really help us, since we only experience things by virtue of the reactions they cause in us. Things we don’t react to are invisible.

我们接受这样一个抽象的观念：现实世界是不同的：但我们所能知道的只是我们如何体验它——而这不可避免地与情感有关。如果你像笛卡尔一样想知道，你如何知道世界在我们感觉之外真实存在，简单的答案是它不符合预期。无论外面有什么，它都会“反推”。

We accept the abstract idea that the world as it really is, is different: but all we can know is how we experience it – and that is inextricably affectively. If you wonder, as Descartes did, how you can know that the world truly exists outside of our sensations of it, the simple answer is that it does not conform to expectations. Whatever is out there, it ‘pushes back’.

《思考，快与慢》一书的出版可能是我们对人类思维理解的最新进展之一，该书总结了诺贝尔奖获得者丹尼尔·卡尼曼和同事阿莫斯·特沃斯基的研究成果。

Possibly one of the biggest recent advances in our understanding of the human mind was the publication of the book Thinking, Fast and Slow, which summarized the work of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and colleague Amos Tversky.

像许多通俗心理学书籍一样，这本书的很多内容都是描述“偏见”：偏见有多少种；我们离理性有多远。这本书之所以取得进步，是因为它重新引入了激进的观点——压抑自弗洛伊德和荣格以来，我们就认为我们从根本上来说是非理性的存在，我们的大部分思考都是无意识的。

Like many popular psychology books, a lot of it consisted of describing ‘biases’: how many of them there are; how far we stray from being rational. What made this book an advance is that it re-introduces the radical idea – suppressed since Freud and Jung – that we are fundamentally irrational beings, and that much of our thinking is unconscious.

卡尼曼和特沃斯基提出的模型大致如下：你的大脑由两个系统组成——系统 1 和系统 2。系统 1 是无意识的直觉系统，在思考时承担大部分繁重的工作。它是本能系统，让你能够走路、开车，或者决定是否喜欢某人，而无需用笔和纸来弄清楚。相比之下，系统 2 是缓慢、有条不紊和理性的。系统 1 会回答“你今天感觉如何？”这个问题，而系统 2 会回答“86 x 57 是多少？”这个问题。

The model that Kahneman and Tversky introduce is roughly as follows: your mind is comprised of two systems – System 1 and System 2. System 1 is the unconscious, intuitive system that does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to thinking. It’s the instinctive system that enables you to walk, drive a car, or decide whether or not you like someone without having to use a pen and paper to figure it out. System 2, by contrast, is slow, methodical and rational. Whilst System 1 will answer the question: ‘How are you feeling today?’, System 2 will answer the question: ‘What is 86 x 57?’

本书的主旨是，系统 1 所做的工作比我们意识到的要多得多，而且其方式很少遵循理性法则。与许多流行的心理学教科书一样，它收录了大量研究，这些研究表明，在各种各样的情况下，我们的决定不是理性的（由系统 2 做出），而是出于本能（由系统 1 做出）。

The thrust of the book is that System 1 does much more of the work than we realize, and in a fashion which rarely follows the laws of reason. Like many popular psychology texts, it catalogues much of the research demonstrating that, across a wide variety of contexts, our decisions are not taken rationally (by System 2) but instead instinctively (by System 1).

我们总想以为自己是理性的，但其实不然。高等法院的法官会本能地决定某人是否有罪，以及他们应该在监狱服刑多久，雇主会本能地决定是否雇用某人，你和我也会本能地决定是否为未来存钱。

We like to imagine we are rational, but we are not. High Court judges make disturbingly instinctive decisions about whether someone is guilty, and how long they should spend in prison, employers make instinctive decisions about whether or not to hire someone, you and I make instinctive decisions around whether or not to put money aside for the future.

读完本书后，你可能会认为系统 2 的存在只是为了为我们本能地做出的所有决定提供事后合理化——一个掩饰故事。

By the end of the book you would be forgiven for thinking that System 2 exists only to provide a post hoc rationalization – a cover story – for all the decisions we take instinctively.

这个故事的寓意是什么？嗯，我们并不是非常理性。在很多情况下，从理性的角度来看，我们的本能决定都是错误的决定。总之，我们可能需要考虑使用外部指南，例如统计方法或计算机，来处理很多事情。

What is the moral of the tale? Well – we’re not terribly rational. In many contexts, our instinctive decisions are bad decisions from a rational perspective. In sum, we might want to think about using external guides, such as statistical methods or a computer, for a bunch of stuff.

总体而言，偏见的普及是一种健康的发展方向：帮助我们认识到人们远没有我们想象的那么理性（这是我们的另一个偏见）。但它应该让你觉得这是一个非常奇怪的结果：如果我们真的更理性，那么数百万年的进化肯定会选择那些偏见较少的个体。为什么所有理性的生物都灭绝了？

Overall the popularization of biases is a healthy direction of travel: helping us to see that people are nowhere near as reasonable as we might like to believe (another bias of ours). But it should strike you as a very odd outcome: if we were really better off being rational, surely millions of years of evolution would have selected for the less biased individuals. Why did all the rational creatures die out?

系统示例

Examples of systems

事实上，系统 1/系统 2 的区别只不过是笛卡尔身心二元论的伪装。这两个系统之间的区别有时用开车的例子来阐明，同时完成 17 x 24 的和——人们应该避免同时做这些事情。它说明了“缓慢而费力”的系统 2 过程如何干扰“本能而轻松”的系统 1 过程。但等等——进行对话怎么样？

In fact the System 1/System 2 distinction is little more than Descartes’ body–mind dualism in disguise. The difference between the two systems is sometimes elucidated using the example of driving a car and concurrently completing the sum 17 x 24 – things which one should avoid doing simultaneously. It serves as an illustration of how ‘slow and effortful’ System 2 processes can interfere with ‘instinctive and easy’ System 1 processes. But wait – how about holding a conversation?

问题是，一方面，我们确实发现开车时交谈很容易，但另一方面，我们通常认为交谈是一种理性的系统 2 型活动（而不是像接球这样的本能活动）。在语言章节中，我将说话描述为一种彻底的情感系统 1 活动，而不是理性的系统 2 活动。

The thing is that on the one hand we do find it easy to hold a conversation while driving – but on the other hand we generally think of conversation as a rational System 2-type activity (rather than an instinctive activity like, say, catching a ball). In the chapter on language, I have described speaking not as a rational System 2 activity but a thoroughly affective System 1 activity.

困难之处在于心算对于生物来说是一件非常奇怪的事情，因此我们似乎是在根据一种特别近期的、具有文化意义的行为来争论整个心理操作系统的存在。

The difficulty with this is that mental arithmetic is a really odd thing for a creature to do, so it seems as though we are arguing for the existence of an entire mental operating system on the basis of a peculiarly recent, if culturally significant, behaviour.

用教育章节中的例子来说，想象一个火星文化，每个人都必须记住圆周率，相应的心理模型提出了两个火星心理系统：本能系统和圆周率系统。你难道不会忍不住说这是胡说八道吗？

To use the example from the chapter on education, imagine a Martian culture where everyone has to memorize Pi, and where the corresponding psychological model proposes two Martian mental systems: the instinctive system, and the Pi system. Wouldn’t you be tempted to call BS?

正如我之前提到的那样，逻辑和数学被认为是理性思维的典型，但一般来说，人类和狗都不会使用它们。几乎没有人会这样做。自从上学以来，我就再也不用做长除法了。当然，在日常生活中，有时我们会说我们已经构建了一个理性的论证，或者量刑决定是合乎逻辑的，但正如卡尼曼指出的那样，如果你仔细观察，这种情况实际上不会发生——“理性”只是被当作“令人信服”这个词来使用。

As I have mentioned previously – logic and mathematics are held up as epitomizing rational thought – but generally speaking neither humans nor dogs use them. Hardly anybody does. I haven’t had to do long division since I was at school. Of course, in everyday life sometimes we say that we have constructed a rational argument – or that a sentencing decision was reached logically – but as Kahneman points out, this doesn’t really happen when you look closely – ‘rational’ is just being used like the word ‘compelling’.

确实，有时我们用大脑做事会感觉特别费力——但这只意味着我们以一种不合常理的方式使用系统 1——并不是说有一个单独的系统。让我直截了当地说：没有系统2。 “系统 2”只是指以不自然的方式使用系统 1。

It’s true that sometimes we do things with our brains that feel especially effortful – but this just means we are using System 1 in a way that it was not designed for – not that there is a separate system. Let me be direct: there is no System 2. ‘System 2’ just refers to using System 1 in an unnatural way.

“系统 2”思维有点像用脚测量距离：你可以做到，但感觉怪异、不自然，而且速度非常慢。同样，你可以训练一只鸽子做简单的加法，但训练过程会很艰辛（就像我们一样），不可靠、不复杂（就像我们一样），而且你不会得出结论说鸽子现在有大脑中一个独立的“理性”部分（我们也没有）。

‘System 2’ thinking is a bit like using your feet to measure a distance by placing them end-to-end: you can do it, but it feels weird and unnatural and is painstakingly slow. Likewise you could train a pigeon to do simple sums, but the training process would be arduous (as it is with us), it would be unreliable and unsophisticated (as it is with us), and you wouldn’t conclude that the pigeon now has a separate ‘rational’ part of its brain (any more than do we).

系统 1 和系统 2 并不存在，就像理性和情感并不存在分开一样。存在的是一种平衡一组感觉和另一组感觉的能力。人类和其他生物一样，本能地处理经验。但我们也有一种“如果”的能力——抵消感觉的能力关于现在，带着对假设状态的感受：“如果我偷了那本书，然后被抓，我会进监狱，丢掉工作吗？”——甚至：“如果我偷了这本书，我还会觉得自己是个好人吗？”

There isn’t a System 1 and System 2 any more than there exists reason and emotion separately. What there is is an ability to balance one set of feelings against another. Human beings, like other creatures, process experience instinctively. But we also have a ‘what if’ ability – the ability to offset feelings about the right now, with feelings about hypothetical states: ‘What if I steal that book, and I get caught, and I land up in prison and I lose my job?’ – or even: ‘Will I still feel that I am a good person if I steal this book?’

再次强调，我们这里谈论的并不是理性，这只是根据对不存在的事物的感觉来调节我们行为的能力。这显然很方便。

Once again, this isn’t really rationality that we are talking about here – it’s just the ability to moderate our behaviour according to feelings about non-present things. This is obviously handy.

我们甚至可以用统计数据来做到这一点——我们可以说：“如果我在做这个招聘决定时，不是凭直觉，而是用我对统计模型的抽象理解来指导我的决定，会怎么样？也许我可以在高管会议上吹嘘这一点。”

We can even do it with statistics – we can say: ‘What if instead of going with my gut on this hiring decision, I use my abstract attachment to statistical models to guide my decision instead? Perhaps I will be able to boast about it at executive meetings.’

认知作为情感系统

Cognition as an affective system

一旦我们承认认知是一个完全情感的系统，偏见和相关研究就都成立了。我们的认知过程受到人们感受的影响，因为认知就是情感。

Once we concede that cognition is an entirely affective system, the biases and related research fall into place. Our cognitive processes are influenced by what people are feeling, because cognition is affect.

在关于学习的章节中，我们发现你记住的内容会受到你现在的感受的影响：你可能还记得伊丽莎白·洛夫特斯 (Elizabeth Loftus) 发现人们对汽车速度的估计会因她在问题中使用“撞坏”或“接触”一词而有所不同。这是我自己的预测：让伊丽莎白的一半参与者坐过山车，另一半参与者坐图书馆，看看这会对他们的估计产生什么影响。

In the chapter on learning, we discovered that what you remember can be influenced by what you are feeling right now: you may recall that Elizabeth Loftus found people’s estimates of the speed of a car varied on whether she used the word ‘smashed’ or ‘contacted’ in her question. Here’s a prediction of my own: put half of Elizabeth’s participants on a rollercoaster, the other half in a library, and see what that does to their estimates.

认知具有情感基础，这也解释了我们思维中一些更令人困惑的怪异现象，例如联觉现象。联觉是一种我们可以轻易将颜色或声音归因于表面上不相关的概念的现象。

Possessing an affective basis for cognition also explains some of the more perplexing peculiarities in our thinking – such as the phenomenon known as synaesthesia. Synaesthesia is a phenomenon in which we can easily attribute colours or sounds to superficially unrelated concepts.

与大多数人类能力一样，这种能力也呈正态分布（大多数人都具有某种程度的能力，少数人几乎不具备或非常具备）。在极端情况下，“联觉者”能够告诉你你的名字闻起来是什么味道、摸起来是什么感觉，或者你的声音是什么味道。更常见的是，联觉包括体验字母或数字具有不同的颜色（字素-颜色联觉）。

Like most human abilities, this one is normally distributed (most people possess it to some extent, and a few people hardly at all or to a very high degree). In extreme cases a ‘synaesthete’ will be able to tell you how your name smells and feels to the touch – or how the sound of your voice tastes. More commonly, synaesthesia involves experiencing letters or numbers as having different colours (grapheme-colour synaesthesia).

有趣的是，你可能不觉得这很难想象：如果我让你给“鲁伯特”和“海伦”这两个名字赋予颜色，你可能不会感到困惑。你甚至可以告诉我哪种食物或哪种颜色与这两个名字最相配（我个人认为鲁伯特是深红色的，海伦是浅绿色和黄色的）。

The funny thing is, you probably don’t find this difficult to imagine: if I were to ask you to attribute colours to the names ‘Rupert’ and ‘Helen’, you probably wouldn’t struggle. You might even be able to tell me which food or which colour would go best with each name (personally I see Rupert in burgundy and Helen in a light green and yellow pattern).

这一现象一直让科学家感到困惑；流行的解释暗示联觉者的大脑之间的连接性增强，但已经找到了支持这一假设的证据。这种解释之所以出现，部分原因是我们喜欢将大脑想象成一个个隔开的区域，不同的区域用于存储不同类型的信息。

The phenomenon continues to baffle scientists; popular explanations allude to enhanced connectivity across the brains of synaesthetes, but scant evidence for this hypothesis has been found. In part, this type of explanation arises because we like to imagine the brain as compartmentalized, with different areas used for storing different kinds of information.

情感语境模型消除了这种不必要的复杂性：由于所有经验都会转化为情感代码，因此我们可以自然而然地跨模态比较经验。关联程度的放松或收紧会导致或多或少的创造性比较，但我们都会在某种程度上体验到这种现象。

The affective context model cuts through this unnecessary complexity: since all experience is converted into an affective code, we can naturally compare experiences cross-modally. A loosening or a tightening of the degree of association will lead to more or less creative comparisons, but we will all experience the phenomenon to some extent.

毕竟，我们需要能够快速适应新情况，而且由于没有两种情况完全相同，我们需要能够利用类似的经验进行概括。你可以带我去另一个国家的一家餐馆，虽然我以前从未遇到过，但感觉就像在餐馆一样，我会知道如何表现。

After all, we need to be able to quickly adapt to new situations, and since no two situations are exactly the same we need to be able to generalize using experiences that feel similar. You can take me to a restaurant in a different country, and though I have never encountered it before, it will feel like a restaurant and I will know how to behave.

如果我们做不到这一点，我们就会像电脑一样行事。这种情感编码机制支撑着最近发现的一系列人类思维特征。

If we were unable to do this, we would act, well, like computers. And it is this same affective coding mechanism that underpins a host of more recently discovered features of human thought.

锚定

Anchoring

我要问您一个问题：您认为阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦去世时年龄是 93 岁还是 93 岁以下？您认为他有多大年纪？

Here’s a question for you: would you say Albert Einstein was more or less than 93 years old when he died? How old do you think he was?

您可能有兴趣知道，这本书的一半版本都带有不同的问题。其中一半的问题是“您认为阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦去世时年龄是 63岁还是63 岁以下？您认为他有多大年纪？”

You might be interested to know that half of the copies of this book have been published with a different question. In half of them, the question is ‘would you say Albert Einstein was more or less than 63 years old when he died? How old do you think he was?’

当然，那部分是我编造的。但是如果我们出版了这本书的两个版本，几乎可以肯定的是，被问到“63”问题的那群人的估计值会低于被问到“93”问题的那群人的估计值。这是一种称为锚定效应的效应，也是称为启动效应的现象的一个具体例子。

Of course I have made that bit up. But if we had published two versions of this book, almost certainly the estimates of the group asked the ‘63’ question would be lower than the estimates of the group asked the ‘93’ question. This is an effect called anchoring, and is a specific instance of a phenomenon called priming.

从本质上讲，锚定效应是指，如果你对某件事没有特别的想法——比如，你愿意捐多少钱来拯救北极熊——那么一个初始数字将指导你的决定。在街上拦住你并建议你捐 20 美元的人，很可能比拦住你并建议你捐 5 美元的人收到的捐款金额更高。

In essence, with anchoring, if you didn’t have any particular feeling about something – say, how much you would be prepared to donate to save polar bears – then an initial figure will guide your decision. A person who stops you in the street and suggests a $20 donation is likely to receive donations to a value higher than someone who stops you and suggests a $5 donation.

从情感上来说，这很容易解释。如果有人在你的心里植入了一种你之前没有强烈感觉的感觉，那么你的反应就会反映出这种情感状态。

Affectively speaking, this is easy to explain. If someone has planted a feeling in your mind, where you didn’t already have a strong feeling, then your responses will reflect that affective state.

在设计学习体验时，要牢记这一重要影响：一方面，我们经常想让人们处于不确定如何行动的境地，因为在做决定时，他们会重新定义自己。但如果他们做出了错误的决定怎么办？

This is a powerful effect to bear in mind when designing learning experiences: on the one hand we will often want to put people in situations where they are unsure how to act, because in making a decision they will be re-defining themselves. But what if they make the wrong decision?

锚定法（例如使用故事）有助于将天平偏向正确的方向，但又不至于完全遵从。桌子上的榜样照片可能足以在一天中的重要决策点锚定一个人的思维模式。学习专业人士往往不会这样想；对事件和内容的执着会阻碍这一过程。

Anchoring – for example using stories – can help tip the scales in the right direction whilst falling short of mere conformity. The photograph of a role model on a desk might be sufficient to anchor one’s mindset at significant decision points throughout the day. Learning professionals tend not to think in these terms; a fixation on events and content gets in the way.

即使人们认为自己的行为是理性的，锚定效应也是可以测量的。在一项特别令人不安的实验中，德国法官在对刑事案件的描述作出判决之前，会掷一对骰子。他们清楚地知道骰子与案件无关——然而，掷出数字较高的人往往比掷出数字较低的人建议的刑期长得多。

The effect of anchoring is measurable even where people believe they are acting rationally. In one particularly disturbing experiment, German judges rolled a pair of dice prior to passing judgement on a description of a criminal case. It was made clear to them that the dice bore no relation to the case – however, those who rolled a higher number tended to suggest significantly longer sentences than those who rolled lower numbers.

如果您发现自己面临监禁，您可以考虑穿一件印有低数字的衬衫。

If you ever find yourself facing a prison sentence, you might consider wearing a shirt with a low number on it.

光环效应

The halo effect

这种效应的另一个例子是光环效应。看看下面对 Sam 的描述：

Another example of this effect comes in the form of the halo effect. Take a look at the following description of Sam:

萨姆聪明、勤奋、冲动、挑剔、固执、嫉妒。

Sam is intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn, envious.

现在，您不会惊讶地发现，在实验中，一半的参与者以相反的顺序阅读这样的描述（Sam 嫉妒、固执、挑剔、冲动、勤奋、聪明），他们在好感度量表上对 Sam 的评分低于按您顺序阅读这些描述的人。为什么会这样？

By now you won’t be surprised to learn that in experiments where half the participants read a description like this in reverse order (Sam is envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious, intelligent), they rate Sam lower on a likeability scale than people who read them in the order you did. Why is that?

解释的第一部分是，我们对每个单词都会产生情绪反应——事实上，单词就是如此：一个能引起情绪反应的声音。解释的第二部分是，我们是受体内平衡控制的生物：换句话说，我们不断努力追求一种稳定状态，一种我们花费最少脑力努力的状态。在认知层面，我们将其称为“均衡”和“平衡”；一种我们的世界模型与我们的经验相匹配的状态。简而言之：一旦我们对某件事下定了决心，我们就不想改变它。

The first part of the explanation is that we react emotionally to each of the words – indeed, that is all a word is: a sound that creates an emotional reaction. The second part of the explanation is that we are creatures governed by homeostasis: in other words, we constantly strive for a steady state, one in which we expend the least mental effort. At a cognitive level we have seen this referred to as ‘equilibrium ’and ‘balance’; a state in which our model of the world matches our experience. In simple terms: once we’ve made up our mind about something, we don’t like to change it.

您可能从自己的经验中知道，我们通常不喜欢世界强迫我们改变对事物的看法——例如，当我们带朋友去我们认为是城里最好的披萨店时，食物却很糟糕。“也许今天的主厨病了”，你会说。

As you probably know from your own experience, we generally don’t like it when the world forces us to change our opinion of things – for example, when we take a friend to what we believe to be the best pizza place in the city, and the food turns out to be terrible. ‘Maybe the regular chef was sick today’, you suggest.

就光环效应而言，一旦我们对某事物（例如某个人）产生了积极的感觉，我们就不太愿意改变自己的观点，因此我们倾向于忽略矛盾的证据，选择性地记住支持性证据。

In the case of the halo effect, once we feel positive about something – a person for example – we don’t much like to change our opinion, so we tend to disregard contradictory evidence and selectively remember supporting evidence.

当然，这也适用于我们：人们喜欢自我感觉良好。这种自我情绪效应延伸到一系列自利偏见——例如乐观偏见（感觉我们的生活会比平均水平更好），或对我们的判断过度自信。举个例子，如果你对选择哪款汽车犹豫不决，一旦你做出了决定，你对自己决定的信心就会大大增加，你就能想出很多理由来证明你的选择是正确的。正如弗里茨·海德所说的那样，如果我们自我感觉良好，我们就会对自己做出的决定感到满意。

This extends to us, of course: people like to feel good about themselves. This self-sentiment effect extends to a whole range of self-serving biases – for example optimism bias (feeling that our lives will be better than average), or over-confidence in our judgements. As an example, if you are undecided about your choice of car, once you have made your decision your confidence in your decision will go up dramatically and you will be able to come up with lots of reasons why your choice was the right decision. Just as Fritz Heider suggested, if we feel good about ourselves, we want to feel good about the decisions we have made.

这个模型可以用来解释传统多元化培训有时会产生适得其反的效果。1从本质上讲，那些通常自我感觉良好的人在培训过程中会对自己产生负面感觉。但这种感觉很容易通过各种合理化解释来纠正——比如^责怪受害者。

This model can be used to explain the sometimes counter-productive effects of conventional diversity training.¹ In essence, people who normally feel pretty good about themselves are made to feel bad about themselves in the course of the training. But this feeling can easily be redressed by various rationalizations – such as blaming the victim.

从本质上讲，人们宁愿为歧视寻找借口，也不愿承担责任，更不愿自我感觉不好。人们试图以这种方式重建的感觉是，世界大体上是公平的，坏事发生在坏人身上。

In essence, rather than shoulder the responsibility for discrimination and feel bad about themselves, people will tend to find justifications for it. The feeling that people are trying to re-establish in this way is that the world is broadly fair, and that bad things happen to bad people.

事实上，《哈佛商业评论》最近发表的一篇题​​为《多元化计划为何失败》的文章发现，传统的多元化培训对改善组织起不到多大作用，而且在许多情况下，培训之后立即导致了期望行为的减少^。2

In fact, a recent Harvard Business Review article entitled ‘Why diversity programs fail’ found that conventional diversity training did very little to improve organizations and in many cases was immediately followed by a reduction in the desired behaviours.²

他们继续描述了更有可能产生积极影响的干预措施，其中之一就是指导安排。你也许明白为什么：当你同意成为某人的导师并长期定期与他们会面时，你很难对某人抱有消极态度。不喜欢一个人并选择定期与他们会面会产生认知失调。

They went on the describe the kinds of interventions more likely to have a positive effect, though – of which one was mentoring arrangements. You can perhaps see why: it’s much harder to hold negative attitudes towards someone when you have agreed to be their mentor and meet regularly with them over extended periods of time. To dislike a person and elect to meet regularly with them would create cognitive dissonance.

改变主意

Changing your mind

在许多组织中，大量的学习内容都与风险有关，包括识别风险、避免风险和管理风险。在制定此类计划时，我们应该牢记，与理性诉求相比，在情感层面产生共鸣时，我们的影响力将更大——例如通过与人们真正关心的事情相关的体验和故事讲述。从理智上讲，人们可能意识到声誉风险会损害公司并最终危及他们的工作，但如果他们的参与度很低，而就业市场却很活跃，那又有什么大不了的呢？

In many organizations, a significant chunk of learning will be dedicated to risk; to identifying it, avoiding it, managing it. In developing such programmes, we should bear in mind that we will have most impact where we can connect at an emotional level – for example through experiences and storytelling that connect to the things that really matter to people – rather than through rational appeals. People may – intellectually speaking – appreciate that reputational risks can damage their company and ultimately endanger their job, but if their level of engagement is low and the job market is buoyant, what’s the big deal?

自称理性的人从来都不是理性的。你有没有想过，为什么广播或电视辩论中的小组成员很少达成一致？如果他们真的在理性地辩论（他们总是声称自己是理性的），这在统计上是不可能发生的：通常有人的论点在逻辑上更有力。

People who claim to be rational are never really so. Have you ever wondered why panellists on radio or TV debates so rarely reach agreement? If they were really arguing rationally (and they invariably claim to be) this would be statistically unlikely: usually someone’s argument is logically stronger.

但不知何故，我们本能地知道，对立双方只会互相咆哮，如果有什么事情发生，他们会更加坚信自己是对的。为什么会这样呢？

But somehow we know intuitively that the opposing sides are just going to bark at each other and come away if anything more convinced that they are right. Why is that?

媒体公司当然知道这一点——这就是为什么他们以这种方式安排辩论（最好是双方最具煽动性的演讲者），因为观众真正是为了观看情绪化的烟火表演。没有人会说：“经过深思熟虑，我承认你的结论是对现有证据更合乎逻辑的解释，我在此改变主意。”我听过成千上万场这样的辩论，从来没有听过有人说过这样的话。

Media companies know this, of course – that’s why they set the debate up in the way that they do (ideally with the most inflammatory speaker from each side) because what audiences are really there for is the emotional fireworks display. At no point is anyone expected to say: ‘On reflection, I concede that your conclusion is the more logical interpretation of the available evidence, and I hereby change my mind’. I have listened to thousands of such debates and never heard anyone say anything like that.

从情感上讲，这是有道理的：人们会依附于一套熟悉的观点和信念。他们不仅会对不熟悉的观点做出负面反应，还会情绪化地为自己的观点辩护——尤其是因为他们清楚地意识到公开承认失败的名誉损失。没有人愿意在电台上承认自己错了。

Affectively speaking, this makes sense: people become attached to a familiar set of opinions and beliefs. Not only do they react negatively to unfamiliar views, it causes them to react emotionally in defence of their own – especially since they are acutely aware of the reputational cost of publicly admitting defeat. Nobody wants to go on the radio and admit that they were wrong.

最近的研究发现，当人们接触到与自己观点相矛盾的观点时，他们往往会变得固执己见，而不是质疑自己的信念——这与理性人所表现出来的情况完全相反。

Recent research has found that people exposed to views that contradict their own, tend to harden rather than question their beliefs – the very opposite of what we would expect if they were rational.

现在原因应该很清楚了：如果你努力建立了一套内部一致的观点，改变一个重要的观点就会破坏平衡；这就像拆除一根脚手架杆。除非你爱上反对你观点的人，否则你最好只是强化你现在的想法，不管他们说什么。

The reasons for this should be clear by now: if you’ve worked hard to build an internally consistent set of views, changing an important one is going upset the balance; it would be like removing a scaffolding pole. Unless you’re in love with the person opposing your view, you’re better off just reinforcing what you currently think, whatever they say.

这一发现在很多方面都得到了证实，最典型的是政治领域。政治辩论双方都震惊地发现，反对派候选人的明显不当行为证据并没有削弱人们对他/她的支持——事实上恰恰相反！我们提供的证据越多，辩论就越两极分化。

This same finding has been replicated in a wide range of contexts; most topically in the area of politics. People on either side of the political debate are gobsmacked that blatant evidence of the opposition candidate’s wrongdoings do nothing to soften support for him/her – in fact the opposite! The more evidence we provide, the more polarized the debate becomes.

全球变暖提供了另一个例子：在气候变化证据如此确凿的当今世界，怎么可能否认气候变化呢？人们真的还相信地球是平的吗？

Global warming provides another example: how can climate change denial exist in a world where the evidence of climate change is overwhelming? Do people really still believe the world is flat?

答案是，如果人们本质上是理性的，我们就不会看到这些影响——但如果他们本质上是情绪化的，我们肯定会看到。你和我都会对想法、物体和事件产生依恋。如果你爱上一个人，那么让一个熟人指出你爱人的缺点可能只会让你对他们的辩护更加坚定，并削弱你与批评者的关系。

The answer is that if people were fundamentally rational, we would not see these effects – but if they were fundamentally emotional we surely would. You and I become attached to ideas, objects, and events. If you are in love with someone, then having an acquaintance point out your darling’s shortcomings may simply cause you to harden your defence of them, and weaken your relationships with the critic.

我们的信仰的事实准确性远不如我们的朋友所相信的那么重要；毕竟，对于社会生物来说，周围人的态度最有可能决定你的感受。

The factual accuracy of our beliefs is far less important than what our friends believe; after all, for a social creature it’s the attitude of those around you that will most likely determine how you feel.

我们时常会碰到以事实准确性为荣的人。仔细观察后，我们发现他们的朋友也以此为荣，因此，他们这么做的动机似乎是如果亲密的朋友指出他们的事实错误，他们会感到羞愧。这是一个反复出现的主题：理性依附于情感。

Every so often we do come across people who pride themselves on factual accuracy. On closer inspection, it turns out that their friends also take pride in this, so it seems that what motivates them is the sense of shame they would experience should a close friend point out their factual blunder. It’s a recurrent theme: reason piggy-backs on sentiment.

那么，你会如何改变一个人？你会如何帮助他们成长？不是通过理性的争论。正如平衡理论所建议的那样，你会更好地了解他们并与他们交朋友——发现共同点，发现你们都关心的事情。但当你坐在家里，通过屏幕看世界时，分享体验的机会很少。

So how would you change someone? How would you help them develop? Not with rational argument. You’d be much better off, as balance theory suggests, getting to know them and befriending them – discovering common ground, things you both care about. But when you’re sitting at home, viewing the world via a screen, opportunities for shared experiences are few and far between.

这使得数字互动（和学习）本质上具有两极分化——即使没有算法积极生成和推广离谱内容。作为一名作家，这对我也是一个挑战：像你一样，我读过很多书，很难想出其中哪一本对我的行为产生了深刻的影响。如果我真的想改变你的想法，我们需要花时间在一起。

This makes digital interaction (and learning) inherently polarizing – even if it weren’t for the algorithms actively generating and promoting outrageous content. It’s also a challenge for me, as an author: like you, I have read many books and I struggle to think of any of them that have profoundly influenced my behaviour. If I really wanted to change your mind, we would need to spend time together.

由于我大部分时间都无法理解，本书的部分内容旨在通过其他方式与您产生共鸣，例如使用您可能认同的一些示例和情况。如果您最终接受我的说法，那不是因为它是正确的，而是因为你对这个想法的感受。例如，如果有一位密友推荐这本书，您可能更倾向于站在我这边。

Since for the most part I can’t, some of this book is intended to connect with you in other ways, such as using a range of examples and situations some of which you may identify with. If, ultimately, you accept what I am saying, it will not be because it is correct – but because of how you feel about the idea. You might be more inclined to take my side if a close friend recommended this book, for instance.

另一种明显体现情感处理体验的方式是替代效应。让我们回到人际关系，看看它是如何运作的。

Another way in which processing our experience affectively is evident is in the phenomenon called the substitution effect. Let’s return to relationships to see how it works.

替代效应

The substitution effect

如果你希望和某人约会，那么经常出现在你暗恋的人的约会中是一个好的开始——事实上，身体上的接近仍然是预测谁最终会和谁在一起的最佳指标。“熟悉产生喜欢”的效应会对你有利，最终你会说服他们，让他们准备好约会，通常是通过谈论你们所有的共同点。

If you are hoping to date someone, then being a regular feature in your crush’s day is a good start – in fact, physical proximity is still the best predictor of who will end up with who in a relationship. The ‘familiarity breeds liking’ effect will work in your favour and eventually you will wear them down to the point where they are prepared to go on a date, generally by talking about all the things you have in common.

但之后你必须想清楚在约会时带他们去哪里。直觉上，你知道如何解决这个问题：弄清楚他们喜欢什么，然后相应地安排你的约会。这部分是因为你想表明你也喜欢他们喜欢的东西——但也因为你可能猜到他们对约会的某些感受会转移到他们对你的感觉上。

But then you have to figure out where to take them on your date. Intuitively, you know how to solve this problem: figure out what they like, then arrange your date accordingly. This is partly because you want to demonstrate that you also like the things they like – but also because you probably guessed that some of how they feel about the date will transfer to how they feel about you.

你会惊讶于这种情感联想技巧的效果。实际上，人们会通过以下方式回答各种各样的问题：简单地检查一下：“我现在感觉如何？”诸如：“经济前景如何？”之类的问题会受到阳光是否照耀的影响。“这个人有罪吗？”会受到你是否感到饥饿的影响。诸如：“你还能活多久？”，“你的假期过得好吗？”，“你对你的人际关系有多满意？”或“你对某个股票价格有多自信？”等一系列问题都取决于你的总体情绪状态，而不是事实信息。人们欺骗自己说他们有充分的理由，而实际上他们只是凭直觉行事。

You would be amazed at the extent to which this affective association trick works. In essence people will answer a whole variety of questions by simply checking: ‘How do I feel right now?’ Questions like: ‘What are the prospects for the economy?’ are influenced by whether the sun is shining. ‘Is this person guilty?’ by whether or not you are feeling hungry. A whole host of questions such as: ‘How long will you live?’, ‘How good was your holiday?’, ‘How happy are you with your relationship?’ or ‘How confident are you in a given stock price?’ are determined by your general emotional state, rather than factual information. People lie to themselves that they have good reasons, when in reality they are just going on gut feel.

我们中的许多人都从直觉层面利用了这一现象。约会就是一个明显的例子；询问一个人对你的感觉的正确时机是约会进行得很顺利的时候，而不是你刚刚打翻了他们的红酒杯，永远弄脏了他们的衣服的时候。

Many of us make use of this phenomenon at an intuitive level. Dating is an obvious example; the right time to ask a person how they feel about you is when the date is going really well, not when you have just knocked their glass of red wine over, permanently staining their clothing.

回到销售，这是一个极佳的应用领域，如果你要提出这个问题：“你想购买这个产品吗？”，你会想让客户在那一刻感觉尽可能好。理性地说，有魅力的、奉承你的销售人员不应该对你对产品的决定产生丝毫影响——但事实上他们确实有影响。

Returning to sales, which is an excellent area of application, if you’re going to pop the question: ‘Would you like to purchase this product?’, you’re going to want to manoeuvre the customer into feeling as good as possible at that point. Rationally speaking, attractive salespeople who flatter you shouldn’t make one jot of difference to your decision about a product – but in reality they do.

我在课堂上度过了一段令人遗憾的时光，我可以证明在教育环境中也存在类似的效果——我赶紧补充说，这不是吸引力的效果，而是我们如何评估学习。在企业教育中，课程的标准通常是在课程结束时使用问卷调查来评估的，问卷调查会询问人们“这门课程的效果如何？”“培训师的能力如何？”等等。

Having spent a regrettable amount of time in classrooms, I can attest to a similar effect in educational contexts – not the effect of attractiveness, I hasten to add, but around how we evaluate learning. In corporate education, the standard of a course is often assessed using questionnaires at the end, where people are asked things like ‘How effective was this course?’, ‘How competent was the trainer?’ and so on.

学习者实际上并不知道这些复杂问题的答案——根据我的经验，没有人知道。要弄清楚课程的效果如何或培训师对行为的影响，需要很少可用的纵向数据。

Learners actually have no idea about the answer to these complex questions – in my experience, nobody does. Figuring out how effective a course is or the impact a trainer has had on behaviour requires the kind of longitudinal data that is rarely available.

那么学生们会怎么做呢？很简单：他们会用快速评估一下自己在提问时的感受来代替。考虑到这一点，精明的教练会在课程的最后几个小时里营造一种“情绪高潮”：也许在周五早点结束，以有趣的练习结束，进行某种掌声或合影——或者可能只是分发糖果。

So what do students do? Simple: they substitute a quick assessment of how they are feeling at the time of asking. In light of this, a canny instructor will engineer an ‘emotional high’ into the final hours of a programme: end early on a Friday perhaps, conclude with a fun exercise, have some kind of applause or group photo take place – or maybe just hand out sweets.

科普书籍错误地认为这些是“偏见”，是偏离理性理想的表现——从笛卡尔到丹尼特，许多哲学家都是这么做的。但认知从始至终都是感性的。

Popular science books make the mistake of seeing these as ‘biases’ and departures from a rational ideal – much as many philosophers from Descartes to Dennett have done. But cognition is sentimental through and through.

认知失调

Cognitive dissonance

与弗里茨·海德的观点类似，大约在同一时间（1957 年），莱昂·费斯廷格提出了上述认知失调理论。总结一下：该理论认为，当人们持有相互矛盾的信念、价值观或想法时，他们会感到心理压力。

Along similar lines to Fritz Heider, and at around the same time (1957), Leon Festinger put forward his aforementioned Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. To recap: the theory says that people experience psychological stress when they hold contradictory beliefs, values or ideas.

这里要注意的是，造成压力的不是逻辑上的不一致，而是情感上的不一致。认知失调就是情感失调。

The thing to notice here is that it is not the logical inconsistency that is stressful: it is the affective inconsistency. Cognitive dissonance is affective dissonance.

情感失调不仅限于价值观冲突：想象一下开车去你最喜欢的餐厅却发现它永远关闭了。你会有什么感觉？失望？震惊？情感失调是驱动任何生物认知适应的基本过程。情感失调是学习和记忆的基础，无论你是人还是老鼠。

Affective dissonance is not limited to a conflict of values: imagine driving to your favourite restaurant only to find that it is permanently closed. How would you feel? Disappointed? Shocked? Affective dissonance is the fundamental process that drives cognitive adaptation in any creature. Affective dissonance is the basis of learning and memory whether you are a man or a mouse.

每个神经系统都努力实现一种状态，即世界的内部模型与世界的外部模型相匹配。每当世界让你感到惊讶时，你就必须调整你的内部模型，这需要能量，并会体验到不和谐。不和谐的感觉就是神经系统体验到需要改变的方式。

What every nervous system strives to achieve is a state where the internal model of the world matches the external model of the world. Every time the world surprises you, you have to adjust your internal model and that takes energy and is experienced as dissonance. The feeling of dissonance is how nervous systems experience the need to change.

当我们设计学习体验时——无论是复杂的飞行模拟器还是简单的角色扮演——我们的目标是：适度的不和谐或不适。我们希望创造一种受到挑战的感觉，这样我们就不得不改变我们对世界的看法。我们甚至可能在克服挑战时体验到一些快乐，就像我们玩电脑游戏一样——我们用预期的成就感来抵消我们当下的不适。挑战必须对我们产生情感上的影响。

When we are designing learning experiences – whether as complex as a flight simulator or as simple as a role play – this is what we are aiming for: the right amount of dissonance, or discomfort. We want to create a sense of being challenged, so that we are obliged to change how we feel about the world. We may even experience some pleasure at overcoming challenges, as we do with computer games – we are offsetting our immediate discomfort with the anticipated pleasure of accomplishment. A challenge must impact us affectively.

例如，人们有时会说“我们从错误中学习得最好”，但这并不完全正确——毕竟我们一直在犯小错误。我在写作时就犯了很多语法错误。我们从自己感觉到的错误中学习——例如，当一位受人尊敬的朋友指出我们写作中存在的小学生错误时。

People will sometimes say, for example, ‘We learn best from our mistakes’, but that isn’t strictly true – after all we are making small mistakes all the time. I am making numerous grammatical slips even as I write. We learn from the mistakes that we feel – for example when a respected friend points out a schoolboy error in our writing.

《正义之心》一书的作者乔纳森·海特说：“情绪化的尾巴摇动着理性的狗”，他只是在向正确的方向前进：狗从鼻子到尾巴都是情绪化的。没有理性的狗。只有情绪化的狗，可以被训练成理性的狗（从字面上和比喻上来说都是如此）。

When Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind, says: ‘The emotional tail wags the rational dog’, he is only on the way to being right: the dog is emotional from nose to tail. There is no rational dog. There is only an emotional dog that can be trained to be rational (this is true both literally and metaphorically speaking).

例如，我们可以训练狗把两个数字相加——就像我们训练人做的那样。我们可以将纯粹的情感系统排列成符合理性法则的方式。

We can, for example, train a dog to add two numbers – just as we have trained people to do so. We can take purely emotional systems and line them up in a way that behaves in accordance with laws of reason.

理性是纯情感主体共同作用的结果。从情感角度而言，人类意识到自己是理性的情感主体，因此会感到困惑。

Rationality is something that emerges from purely emotional agents working together. Because humans are – emotionally speaking – aware of themselves as emotional agents behaving rationally, we get confused.

当我们将心理学视为一个整体时，它与“思考”的概念有着复杂的关系。行为主义可能是最成功的方法，但它完全背弃了思考。

When we consider the science of psychology as a whole, it has had a troubled relationship with the idea of ‘thinking’. Possibly the most successful approach of all – behaviourism – turned its back on thinking entirely.

行为主义需要情感状态

Behaviourism requires affective states

在第 2 章中，我们遇到了行为主义——这一思想流派的出现部分是对弗洛伊德、荣格和心理分析学的回应。西格蒙德·弗洛伊德通过提出一种模型进入了我们的集体意识，在该模型中，人类思维是隐藏在人们视线之外的欲望和压力的庞大“管道系统”的产物——如果你愿意的话，可以称之为地板下。

In Chapter 2 we encountered behaviourism – a school of thought that arose partly as a reaction to Freud, Jung and psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud entered our collective consciousness by proposing a model in which the human mind was the product of a vast ‘plumbing system’ of desires and pressures hidden from view – under the floorboards, if you like.

他最著名的著作之一《梦的解析》提出了一种窥视我们潜意识的机制。不幸的是，他把心理学变成了“恐怖”的东西，虽然这种说法很受欢迎，但却与日益增长的科学化愿望格格不入。

One of his most famous books – The Interpretation of Dreams – suggested a mechanism for taking a peek at our unconscious. Unfortunately, he made psychology ‘spooky’, and whilst that was popular it was out of step with the growing desire to be more scientific.

弗洛伊德谈论的大部分内容都不是直接可观察的——相反，他提出了一系列关于心灵及其运作方式的疯狂而奇妙的故事。这些故事的非凡性质确保了它们的传播和持久性——但却激怒了科学界，因为他们越来越相信你能看到和测量的东西。

Most of what Freud was talking about was not directly observable – instead he proposed a set of wild, fantastic stories about the mind and how it worked. The extraordinary nature of these stories ensured their spread and persistence – but irked a scientific community that were increasingly putting their faith in what you could see and measure.

虽然你无法直接检查人类的潜意识，但你可以看到和衡量人类的行为——这就是行为主义诞生的方式。

Whilst you couldn’t directly inspect the human unconscious, you could see and measure human behaviour – and that’s how behaviourism was born.

本质上，行为主义认为，你无需知道人类和其他生物的大脑在想什么，只需观察它们对刺激（也可以测量）做出的行为反应（你可以测量）即可理解它们。其中一些刺激（“积极强化物”）会让生物更频繁地做某事，而另一些（“惩罚”）会让它们做某事的次数减少。而有些则不会产生任何影响。但为什么呢？

In essence, behaviourism was the idea that you could understand humans and other creatures without having to know anything about what was happening in their heads – solely by looking at their behavioural responses (that you could measure) in response to stimuli (that you could also measure). Some of these stimuli (‘positive reinforcers’) would make creatures do things more often, others (‘punishments’) would result in them doing them less. And some would make no difference at all. But why?

行为主义的核心谜团在整个历史中一直没有得到解答，也在很大程度上没有引起人们的注意。整个方法都建立在对生物如何对不同类型的刺激作出反应的假设之上，事实上，有些事情他们喜欢，有些事情他们不喜欢。没有这些，正强化和负强化的定义仍然是循环的：什么是正强化？让我们更频繁地做某事的东西。什么让我们更频繁地做某事？正强化。

This mystery at the heart of behaviourism remained unanswered, and largely unnoticed, throughout its history. The entire approach rests on assumptions about how creatures react to different kinds of stimuli and the fact that some they like, some they don’t. Without these, the definitions of positive and negative reinforcement remain circular: what is a positive reinforcer? Something that makes us do something more frequently. What makes us do something more frequently? Positive reinforcement.

但正如我们在第 2 章中看到的，情感背景模型可以为我们提供一个更好的答案：积极的强化物是让我们感觉良好的东西。毕竟，老鼠不会学习按压木球的杠杆。行为主义是一套依赖于情感状态理论的技术。

But as we saw in Chapter 2, the affective context model can provide us with a better answer: a positive reinforcer is something we feel good about. Rats don’t learn to press levers for wooden pellets, after all. Behaviourism is a set of techniques that depend on a theory of affective states.

在他的 YouTube 讲座“记忆由此而生” ⁴中，诺贝尔奖获得者、神经学家 Eric Kandel 试图解释简单海蛞蝓（aplysia）的学习过程。他使用了标准的行为主义词汇，谈论经典条件反射和敏感化——但如果不提及情感状态，他就无法做到这一点：他谈到海蛞蝓“学会恐惧”和“吓唬动物”。

In his YouTube lecture ‘Memories are made of this’,⁴ Eric Kandel, Nobel-prize winning neuroscientist attempts to explain learning in the simple sea slug (aplysia). In doing so he uses the standard behaviourist lexicon, talking about classical conditioning and sensitization – but he is unable to do so without making reference to affective states: he talks about the sea slug ‘learning to fear’ and ‘frightening the animal’.

它完美地诠释了行为主义的解释必须始终建立在学习作为一种根本的情感过程的模型之上。

It’s a marvellous illustration of how a behaviourist account must always rest on a model of learning as a fundamentally affective process.

讲座的讽刺之处在于，坎德尔本人利用情感影响来使自己的演讲令人难忘——例如讲笑话，让听众触摸这种奇特的类似海蛞蝓的海栖生物。尽管他凭直觉这样做，但这破坏了任何行为主义的记忆理论，并暗示了学习背后的真正机制：他可以电击海蛞蝓，就像他可以电击学生一样。这就是记忆的构成。

The irony of the lecture is that Kandel himself uses affective impact to make his speech memorable – for example by telling jokes and getting members of the audience to touch the peculiar slug-like sea-dweller. Though he does it intuitively, this undermines any behaviourist account of memory and hints at the real mechanism behind learning: he can shock the sea slug just as he can shock the students. That’s what memories are made of.

从情感角度来看，行为主义者发现了两个非常有趣的事情：首先，我们的行为受到情感后果的强烈影响。这并不奇怪。如果我们做的事情有负面后果，我们倾向于少做，有正面后果，我们倾向于多做。

From an affective standpoint, behaviourists found two really interesting things: first that our behaviour is strongly influenced by its affective consequences. No surprises there. If something we do has negative consequences we tend to do it less, positive consequences we tend to do it more.

此外，他们发现最有效的奖惩安排是可变的，也就是说，你永远不确定你的行为何时会得到回报。例如，在一段关系中，你可能会看到这种情况，一个人非常努力地取悦他的伴侣，因为他永远不知道自己的努力何时会得到回报。行为主义者通常会忽略这些后果本质上是情感的部分。

Moreover, they discovered that the most powerful schedule of rewards and punishments was a variable one, i.e. one where you were never quite sure when your behaviour was going to pay off. You might see this in a relationship, for example, where one person works really hard at pleasing their partner because it’s never entirely clear when their efforts will be rewarded. Behaviourists usually skip the part about these consequences being essentially affective.

他们发现的第二件事是，我们对某事物的感觉可以通过与其他事物的关联而转移，比如代币。如果你被给予一百万美元，你会有什么感觉？感觉不错？一百万美元只是一百万张纸片，或者是电脑屏幕上的一个数字，但我们对此感觉良好，因为美元是代币，我们可以用它来交换我们感觉良好的东西：食物、房子、假期、汽车、马匹等等。

The second thing they discovered is that how we feel about something can be transferred by association to other things – such as a token. How do you feel about being given a million dollars? Pretty good? A million dollars is just a million bits of paper – or a number on a computer screen – but we feel good about it because dollars are tokens that we can exchange for things we do feel good about: food, houses, holidays, cars, horses and so on.

我们用它来交换的一些东西本身可能就是象征：昂贵的衣服或手表也许实际上并不能帮助我们保暖，但它们本身可能是地位的象征，进而可以用来换取钦佩和社会奖励。

Some of the things we might exchange it for may themselves be tokens: expensive clothing or watches may not actually help keep us warm, but may themselves be tokens of status which in turn are exchanged for admiration and social rewards.

情景记忆与语义记忆

Episodic versus semantic memory

语义记忆和情景记忆之间的区别可以追溯到 20 世纪 70 年代的 Endel Tulving。Tulving 认为语义记忆是一种“心理词库”，它提供了使用语言所需的知识，而情景记忆则是对我们发生在我们身上的事情的记忆。5^因此，例如，我们可能已经知道黑斯廷斯战役发生在 1066 年，但这是存储在语义记忆中的，而如果我们真的在场，这种经历就会被保存在情景记忆中。

The distinction between semantic and episodic memory dates back to the 1970s and Endel Tulving. Tulving argued that semantic memory is a kind of ‘mental thesaurus’ that provides the knowledge necessary for the use of language, whilst episodic memory is memory for stuff that happened to us.⁵ So, for example, we may have learned that the Battle of Hastings was in 1066, but this is stored in semantic memory, whilst if we were actually present this experience would be held in episodic memory.

但这是错误的。首先，我们上面已经提出，我们的话语的意义来自于我们的经验和对事物的反应。其次，虽然在课堂上学习黑斯廷斯战役与亲临现场的体验截然不同，但它仍然是一种体验——一个片段。我们的课堂体验可能会被其他体验所取代——我们看过的装甲骑士英勇作战的战争电影——或者哈罗德紧握着眼睛中箭的可怕形象（这大概就是为什么它被记录在贝叶挂毯中的原因）。

But this is wrong. First, we have proposed above that our words draw their significance from our experience and our reactions to things. Second, although learning about the battle of Hastings in a classroom is a very different experience to actually being there, it is an experience – an episode – nonetheless. Our classroom experience may be further supplanted with other experiences – films of battles that we have seen in which armoured knights battle heroically – or the gruesome image of Harold clutching the arrow in his eye (which is presumably why it was captured in the Bayeux tapestry).

伊丽莎白·洛夫特斯 (Elizabeth Loftus) 的研究再次表明，这种区别并不正确：她发现，你可以告诉某人一个事件，而他们后来会相信这件事确实发生在自己身上——从语义到情节的无缝衔接。

Once again, Elizabeth Loftus’ work suggests that the distinction isn’t true: she discovered that you could tell somebody about an episode, and they would later believe that it had actually happened to them – moving seamlessly from semantic to episodic.

这听起来可能有点奇怪，但我们一直都是这么做的：西方流行文化将生日派对描述为孩子们聚集在气球中享用果冻和蛋糕的活动。人们经常会回忆起自己的生日，里面有果冻、蛋糕和气球——即使照片证据表明他们的生日中没有这些东西。

Strange as this may sound, we do this all the time: popular Western culture represents birthday parties as events where children are gathered among balloons to enjoy jelly and cake. People will often recall their own birthdays as having involved jelly, cake and balloons – even if the photographic evidence shows that none were present at any of their birthdays.

同样，如果我让你告诉我你对时钟（语义记忆）了解多少，你的回答将只是你的大脑根据对时钟的各种体验所构建的那种情感抽象。

Likewise, if I ask you to tell me what you know about clocks (semantic memory), your answer will be just the sort of emotional abstraction that your mind builds from your various experiences of clocks.

事实上，如果我问你曾经有过的任何经历，你都会利用自己对各种事物的储存反应——无论是亲身经历过的事件，还是没有亲身经历过的事件——来编造记忆。

In fact, if I ask you about any experience you have had, you will draw on your stored reactions to all kinds of things – events you have experienced first-hand as well as those you have not – in confabulating a memory.

因此，如果我请你描述黑斯廷斯战役，你可能会描述身穿盔甲的士兵，有些骑在马上，在一片开阔的田野上互相冲锋。会有弓箭手、长矛和剑。你会很清楚自己并没有亲临现场，但你的描述很可能是基于相关经历的虚构：参观博物馆、童话故事和电影。

So if I were to ask you to describe the Battle of Hastings you might describe men in armour, some on horseback, charging at each other across an open field. There would be archers, spears and swords. You would be well aware that you were not personally present, but your account would likely be a concoction based on related experiences: trips to museums, fairy-tales and movies.

在我们的记忆中，不同类型的事件（我们经历的和目睹的）通常会融合成一种情感模式，我们用它来唤起记忆。这样更有效率。如果我们认为车祸通常与玻璃破碎有关，那么我们就会记住玻璃破碎。换句话说，每一个所谓的语义记忆都是各种事件的“混合体”，而这些事件又是由情绪反应编造出来的。

In our memories, episodes of different kinds – those we experience and those we witness – will often merge into a single affective pattern that we use to conjure up a memory. It’s just more efficient that way. If we believe that car crashes often involve broken glass, then we remember broken glass. In other words, every so-called semantic memory is a ‘mash-up’ of episodes, which in turn are fabricated from emotional reactions.

还有另一种方法可以反驳语义记忆假说。从进化的角度考虑一下我们的近亲。我们是否认为黑猩猩具有与情景记忆不同的语义记忆？或者狗也有？

There is another way to refute the semantic memory hypothesis. Consider our closest relatives, evolutionarily speaking. Do we imagine that chimpanzees have semantic memory as distinct from episodic? Or that dogs do?

我们没有。我们为什么会如此狂妄地认为，在我们之间相对较短的进化距离中，我们已经发展出了一种全新的大脑信息组织方式？

We do not. And why on earth would we have the hubris to assume that in the relatively short evolutionary distance that separates us we have developed an entirely new way of organizing information in the brain?

最近的一些研究表明，情景记忆和语义记忆存储在大脑的不同部位，因为 fMRI 扫描显示，每种记忆都具有不同的活动模式。与往常一样，还有另一种解释：即“自我”的感觉会导致不同的神经活动模式。

Some recent research has suggested that episodic memory and semantic memory are stored in different part of the brain, since fMRI scans show different patterns of activity corresponding to each. As always, there is an alternative explanation: namely that that the sensation of ‘I-ness’ causes a distinct pattern of neurological activity.

这与以下研究结果一致：人们有时会相信他们仅仅听说过的经历实际上发生在他们身上。

This is consistent with the finding that people can sometimes believe that experiences they merely heard about actually happened to them personally.

总之，我们对学习的理解仍处于原始科学阶段；一堆假设将我们的思维与其他生物区分开来。对它们都持怀疑态度，问问自己：“我们能把这个理论应用到其他动物身上吗？”

In summary, our understanding of learning is still proto-scientific; a patchwork of hypotheses that set our minds apart from other creatures. Be sceptical of them all, ask yourself: ‘Could we apply this theory to other animals?’

如今，我们接受进化论来解释人类是如何变成现在的样子，但似乎我们还没有接受达尔文的观察，即我们与其他生物只是程度上的差异，而非种类上的差异。

These days we accept evolution as an explanation of how we became what we are – but it seems we have yet to accept Darwin’s observation that we are different only in degree but not in kind from other creatures.

“没有任何伟大的事情会不伴随着诅咒而进入凡人的生活。”

‘Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.’

索福克勒斯

SOPHOCLES

当马克·扎克伯格创建了一个网页，让他和哈佛大学的同学们可以分享东西时，他可能没有想到，这个网页会促使一位游戏节目主持人当选美国总统。人很容易预测。技术也很容易预测。但两者之间的互动却很难预测。

When Mark Zuckerberg created a web page where he and his Harvard college chums could share stuff,1 he probably didn’t imagine it would contribute to electing a game-show host to the position of President of the United States. People are easy to predict. Technology is easy to predict. The interaction between the two isn’t.

人是很容易预测的，因为他们一成不变。文化在变，但我们仍然是 7 万年前的猴子。技术在变，但变化方式是可以预测的：它能更快地完成合乎逻辑的事情，它能将影响力扩展到让我们的生活更轻松的方向上。例如，我们可以自信地预测，性在未来仍将是人们使用技术的重要部分。

People are easy to predict because they stay the same. Culture changes, but we remain the same old monkeys that we were 70,000 years ago. Technology changes, but in predictable ways: it does logical things faster, it extends its reach further in directions that make our lives easier. We can confidently predict, for example, that sex will continue to be an important part of the way people use technology in future.

如果你想看透未来，牢记这一点很有帮助：人类从根本上来说具有情感性，而计算机从根本上来说没有情感性：例如，你可以立即否定这样的想法：我们所有人都会配备某种 USB 端口，钻入我们的头骨，让我们能够立即学习一门语言或功夫。

If you want to see into the future, it’s really helpful to bear in mind that people are fundamentally affective in nature, and computers are fundamentally not: for example, you can immediately dismiss the idea that we will all be fitted with some kind of USB port, drilled into our skull, that will enable us to instantly learn a language – or Kung Fu.

我们最终可能会在头上安装一些设备，但它们会代替我们工作——它们会减少我们的学习。你甚至可能会发现自己被绑在一个懂功夫的机器人身上——但除非你在（可能是虚拟现实的）健身课上大汗淋漓，否则你不会懂功夫。

We may well end up with devices attached to our heads, but they will do the work for us – they will reduce our learning. You might even find yourself strapped into a robot that knows Kung Fu – but unless you have sweated your way through the (potentially VR) gym sessions, you will not.

事实上，随着你越来越熟练地掌握技术，你每年学到的东西会越来越少——这一点我们可以肯定。但我们怎么能确定呢？

In fact, as you become ever more technologically enabled you will continue to learn less with each passing year – of this we can be sure. But how can we be sure?

关于未来的书有很多，而且一直都有很多。如今，这些书具有一种当代的紧迫感，以及面对我们现在面临的巨大挑战时的敬畏之情。它们描述了与人工智能和自动化、气候变化、大数据、生物技术、全球化等领域有关的风险和可能性——并思考这些可能会对就业、民主、经济和全球秩序产生影响。

There are, and always have been, many books about the future. These days such books have a contemporary urgency about them and a sense of awe in the face of the immense scale of the challenges we now face. They describe risks and possibilities relating to areas such as AI and automation, climate change, Big Data, biotechnology, globalization – and ponder the impact these might have on employment, democracy, the economy, and the global order.

这些书往往让我们感到忧虑和无助，因为它们预示着不确定性，却没有描述旅程。有些书比较乐观，有些书比较悲观，但总的来说，它们传达的信息是，我们面前有很多变化，我们无法确定它会把我们带向何方，我们只能拭目以待。

These books tend to make us worry and feel powerless, because they signpost uncertainty without describing a journey. Some are more optimistic, some pessimistic, but overall the message is that there is a lot of change ahead of us, we cannot be sure in which direction it will take us, we will just have to wait and see.

在思考未来时，拥有一个适当的参考框架非常重要，否则很难理解任何事情。所谓“适当的参考框架”，是指不受特定历史时期或意识形态立场约束的参考框架。例如，我们可以关注经济和资本在未来的作用——而很容易忽视经济考量实际上只是在过去几千年才出现的。

In thinking about the future, it’s important to have a proper frame of reference otherwise it is very hard to make sense of anything at all. By ‘proper frame of reference’, I mean one that isn’t bound to a particular historical period or ideological standpoint. For example, we can focus on economics and the role of capital in the future – and easily overlook that economic considerations really only arose in the last few thousand years.

一般来说，任何特定于人类的参考框架——例如宗教、经济或政治——都应该受到质疑，因为我们可以有把握地假设，在它之下还有一个更根本的分析层面。

In general, any frame of reference which is specific to humans – such as religion, economics or politics should be called into question, since we can safely assume that there is a more fundamental level of analysis that lies beneath it.

事实上，人类特别容易受到“超自然”故事的影响，我指的是关于我们的起源或命运的故事，这些故事将我们置于动物王国的其余部分之上。这些逃避现实的故事用转瞬即逝的现象来描绘我们的未来——比如金钱、政治或科学——而不是更深刻、永恒的事物。

In fact, humans are especially susceptible to ‘supernatural’ narratives, by which I mean stories about our origins or destiny that place us above the rest of the animal kingdom. These escapist stories paint our future in terms of fleeting phenomena – like money or politics or science – rather than the more profound, immutable ones.

这类书籍缺乏的是正确的视角。我并不是说它们缺乏历史视角，而是它们缺乏一个支撑性的故事：一个让我们的过去、现在和未来都有意义的故事，一个可以用来准确预测命运走向的故事。

What such books lack is the right perspective. I don’t mean that they lack a historical perspective, I mean they lack an underpinning narrative: a story in which all our past, present and future make sense, and one which can be used to accurately predict the course of destiny.

柏拉图和苏格拉底能教给我们什么

What Plato and Socrates can teach us

有这样一个故事；一个古老的故事，它使我们既能解释过去，又能预测未来。它也是一个故事，它将告诉我们关于学习的事情，以及学习将会发生什么。我们已经遇到过这个故事，但我想在这里更详细地讨论它，因为这是我所知道的最重要的故事。这是柏拉图在《斐德罗篇》中分享的一个故事，由他的老师苏格拉底讲述。

There is such a story; an old story that enables us to both interpret the past and anticipate the future. It’s also a tale that will tell us about learning, and what will happen to learning. We have encountered it already, but I’d like to discuss it in more detail here, because it’s the most important story I know of. It’s a story shared by Plato in the Phaedrus, as told by his teacher Socrates.

关于苏格拉底，我们只知道他的两个学生（柏拉图和色诺芬）对他们的导师的描述。苏格拉底本人选择不写。

About Socrates we know only what two of his students (Plato and Xenophon) wrote about their mentor. Socrates himself chose not to write.

故事是这样开始的：

The story starts like this:

很好。我听说，在埃及的瑙克拉提斯住着该国的一位古老神，他的神鸟被称为朱鹭；神的名字是 Theuth。他首先发明了数字和计算、几何和天文学，更不用说跳棋和骰子，尤其是文字（grammata）。

Very well. I heard, then, that at Naucratis in Egypt there lived one of the old gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis; and the name of the divinity was Theuth. It was he who first invented numbers and calculation, geometry and astronomy, not to speak of draughts and dice, and above all writing (grammata).

当时全埃及的国王是泰姆斯……特乌斯来到他面前，展示了他的技艺，并宣称应该将这些技艺传授给其他埃及人。泰姆斯问他每一种技艺的用处；当特乌斯列举时，国王责备或赞扬他认为解释中的优点或缺点。2

Now the king of all Egypt at that time was Thamus… Theuth came to him and exhibited his arts and declared they ought to be imparted to other Egyptians. And Thamus questioned him about the usefulness of each one; and as Theuth enumerated, the King blamed or praised what he thought were the good or bad points in the explanation.2

因此，我们今天所知道的埃及神托特将写作的天赋交给了泰姆斯国王进行评判。你可能会想，为什么神会担心国王的想法，但泰姆斯是众神之王，相比之下，托特就像半神，而这种情况很像我们熟悉的电视剧《龙穴》，剧中一位年轻的企业家试图向谨慎的投资巨龙推销他们有前途的想法，并大肆宣扬其好处和潜力。

So the Egyptian god we know today as Thoth brings the gift of writing to be judged by King Thamus. You might wonder why a god would be worried about what a king thinks, but Thamus is king of all the gods, so by comparison Thoth is something like a demi-god, and the scenario is a lot like the familiar TV series Dragons’ Den in which a young entrepreneur attempts to pitch their promising idea to the circumspect investment dragons by extolling its benefits and potential.

那么托特有了他的伟大想法——写作——他要如何将它推销给泰姆斯国王呢？

So here’s Thoth with his big idea – writing – how is he going to sell it to King Thamus?

谈到书写，特乌斯说道，“国王陛下，这种技艺将使埃及人更加聪明，并能提高他们的记忆力；我的发明是一种既能增强记忆力又能增强智慧的良药（药物）。”

When it came to writing, Theuth said, ‘This discipline, my King, will make Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; my invention is a cure (pharmakon) for both memory and wisdom.’

因此，想象一下托特作为年轻而热切的企业家：“我的发明可以让你成为超人！我保证它会让你更聪明、更睿智！它甚至会提高你的记忆力！”这几乎就是我们今天对写作的看法——它是弥补我们记忆力衰退的东西，是人类智力缺陷的补救措施，也是文明的基石。但令人难以置信的是，泰姆斯国王拒绝写作，以下是他所说的话：

So picture Thoth as the young eager, entrepreneur: ‘My invention can make you superhuman! I promise it will make you smarter, wiser! It will even improve your memory!’ This is pretty much how we see writing today – as something that compensates for the failing of our memories, a remedy for human intellectual frailty, and the cornerstone of civilization. But – incredibly – King Thamus rejects writing, and here’s what he has to say:

我的艺术大师 Theuth，一个人可以创造艺术的元素，另一个人可以判断它对那些将要使用它的人的危害和有用程度。现在，既然您是书面文字之父，您的父爱让您说出了与它们真正的力量完全相反的话。事实上，这项发明会让那些学会了它的人的灵魂变得健忘，因为他们不需要锻炼记忆力，能够依靠所写的内容，利用他们自己不熟悉的外部标记的刺激……

Theuth, my master of arts, to one man it is given to create the elements of an art, to another to judge the extent of harm and usefulness it will have for those who are going to employ it. And now, since you are the father of written letters, your paternal goodwill has led you to pronounce the very opposite of what is their real power. The fact is that this invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it because they will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written, using the stimulus of external marks that are alien to themselves…

同一个希腊词pharmakon可以翻译为“治愈”或“毒药”。因此，基本动态是这样的：托特说：“写作很棒——它是人类弱点的解药”，而泰姆斯说：“在你看来，它可能是这样，但它实际上是一种毒药——与治疗完全相反——它实际上会让我们变得更弱。我不相信它。”但我们相信它。

The same Greek word – pharmakon – may be translated as ‘cure’ or ‘poison’. So the basic dynamic is this: Thoth says: ‘Writing is great – it’s a cure for human weaknesses’ and Thamus says: ‘It might look that way to you, but it’s really a poison – the very opposite of a remedy – it will actually make us weaker. I’m not buying it.’ But we bought it.

请注意，这里有三重讽刺：苏格拉底讲述了一个关于写作危险的故事——他拒绝写下来。柏拉图随后把它写下来，并承诺写一个关于写作其实是一个非常糟糕（有害）的想法的故事！最后的讽刺是——正如 Thamus 的预测——2000 多年后，我们完全失去了理解这个故事的能力。

Note that there is a triple irony here: Socrates is relating a story about the dangers of writing – which he refuses to write down. Plato then writes it down and in doing so commits to writing a story about how writing is actually a really bad (toxic) idea! The final irony is that – true to Thamus’ prediction – we’ve completely lost the ability to understand the story more than 2,000 years later.

从这一点来看，写作确实看起来是一种“治疗方法”——但塔姆斯发现写作是一种外来的东西，更像是寄生虫——它以我们为食，随着我们变得越来越弱，它变得越来越强大。

At this point it certainly looks like writing is a ‘cure’ – but Thamus spots that writing is something alien, something more like a parasite – it feeds on us, growing stronger as we grow weaker.

塔姆斯不需要将写作描述为“外来者”，他只需以“外部标记”结束他的评论即可。通过将写作描述为外来者，他暗示写作有自己的议程。人类与写作之间的关系之所以有效，是因为寄生虫为我们创造了更好的生活条件，以换取某种东西（你能猜出那是什么吗？）。

Thamus didn’t need to describe writing as ‘alien’, he could have simply ended his comments at ‘external marks’. By describing it as alien, he implies that writing has an agenda of its own. The relationship between humans and writing works because the parasite creates ever better living conditions for us in return for something (can you guess what that is?).

体内平衡是我们与最原始的生物——以及所有能够学习的生物——共有的驱动力。它迫使我们不懈地寻求更好的条件、更轻松的生活。因此，我们与技术达成了交易：更轻松、更安全的生活。一个充满技术气息的巢穴。随着知识和能力被移交给自动化环境，随着时间的流逝，学习的需要越来越少。

Homeostasis is the drive we share with the most primitive organisms – with every creature that can learn. It compels us relentlessly to seek out better conditions, easier lives. And so the bargain with technology is struck: easier, safer lives. A nest feathered with technology. With each passing year the need to learn less as knowledge and capability are handed to an automated environment.

想想看：如果你搭上时光机，发现自己被困在石器时代——你会如何应对？你能重现哪些现代发明？iPhone？不行。烤面包机呢？你会如何发电？你知道怎样冶炼铁吗？

Consider this: if you hitched a ride on a time machine and found yourself stranded in the Stone Age – how well would you cope? Which of your modern-day inventions would you be capable of recreating? An iPhone? No. How about a toaster? How would you generate electricity? Do you know how to smelt iron?

让我们面对现实吧——你会很难生火。按照穴居人的标准，你可能被认为是个傻瓜——无法打猎，无法区分不同的植物，无法自己做衣服。不过你会在沙子上画一些疯狂的图画。

Let’s face it – you’d struggle to create fire. You’d probably be considered an imbecile by caveman standards – unable to hunt, to distinguish one plant from another, incapable of making your own clothes. You’d draw some wild pictures in the sand though.

为什么这个故事对于理解我们的未来如此重要？从根本上讲，这不是一个关于写作的故事，而是关于技术的诞生以及它如何以稳态为生的故事。这个故事讲述了为什么随着我们的生活变得越来越舒适和可预测，我们每年学到的东西会越来越少。

Why is this particular story so important in understanding our future? Fundamentally, it’s not a story about writing, but about the birth of technology and how it feeds on homeostasis. It’s a story about why with every passing year we will learn less, as our lives become more comfortable and predictable.

科技从我们身上夺走了什么？

What does technology take from us?

技术，而非写作，是外来寄生虫；它似乎与人类存在着共生关系。与许多物种天生具有的语言不同，写作很难学——我们必须经过多年的艰苦努力才能适应写作。写作使我们适应了写作，反过来，它通过文化给我们带来安慰。

Technology, not writing, is the alien parasite; something that exists in a seemingly symbiotic relationship with humans. Unlike language, which comes naturally to many species, writing is difficult to learn – we have to be adapted for writing, painstakingly and over the course of many years. Writing adapts us and in return it offers comfort via culture.

随着图书馆在启蒙世界各地兴起，它们看起来并不是什么非常危险的事情——恰恰相反——但正如泰姆斯所警告的那样，知识开始被外化。

As libraries sprung up around the enlightened world, they didn’t seem like a terribly dangerous thing – quite the opposite – but what started to happen was that knowledge became externalized, just as Thamus warned.

这是一个很棒的技巧，因为这意味着我们每个人都可以“站在巨人的肩膀上”——一代又一代的人不必围坐在篝火旁背诵神圣的故事——而是只需在书中寻找答案即可。

This is a great trick, because it means that each of us can ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’ – generations do not have to recite the sacred stories around the camp fire – instead they can just look up the answer in a book.

因此，我们的文化开始逐渐成长——包含越来越多的知识，尽管我们每个人所知道的却越来越少——我们把知识投入到我们周围的事物中，结果我们每个人需要记住的东西越来越少。

As a consequence, our culture began to grow incrementally – embodying more and more knowledge even as each of us individually knew less and less – we put our knowledge into the things around us, with the result that each of us needed to hold less in our heads.

一开始，这种关系很复杂——我们必须通过写作来适应，才能开始将知识外化。随着技术能力的提高，我们有可能降低“入门要求”，很快我们就不需要写作，只需要说话——然后也许只需要思考。

In the beginning the relationship was complicated – we had to be adapted, via writing, in order to begin externalizing knowledge. As technology grew in capability, it became possible to lower the ‘entry requirements’, to the point where soon we will not need to write, we will only need to speak – and then perhaps merely to think.

在我写这篇文章的时候，我家里就有了一位人工智能助手。我可以让它给我送披萨，披萨就会神奇地送到我手上。除了如何给它插上电源，我对它的几乎每个方面都几乎一无所知。我不知道它所包裹的塑料的化学成分、编程语言、它所包含的电路数量或类型。我不知道它与披萨店之间复杂的价值链——甚至不知道是否有人参与其中。

As I write, I have an AI assistant in my house. I can ask it to bring me pizza, and pizza will magically arrive. I know next to nothing about almost every aspect of it, barring how to plug it in. I am ignorant of the chemical composition of the plastics in which it is encased, the language in which it is programmed, the number or type of circuits it contains. I do not know the complex value chain that connects it to the pizza people – or even if people are involved at all.

事实上，可能没有一个人知道这一切：创造这些知识所需的集体知识分散在需要创造这些知识的“价值链”中的数千个头脑中。我们就像我们的蚂蚁窝；我们知道自己在做什么，但不知道蚂蚁窝在做什么。

Indeed, it is likely no single person knows all this: the collective knowledge required for its creation is scattered across thousands of heads situated in the ‘value chain’ that require its creation. We are much like our nest of ants; we know what we are doing, but not what the nest is doing.

为什么技术的本质不可避免地会消除人类的学习？从婴儿到成人的旅程是一个痛苦的过程，在此期间，学习使我们适应周围世界的不便。但是，如果我们能够适应世界，消除所有这些令人讨厌的不便，并完全减少我们的学习需要，那会怎样？如果我们不必学习如何种植庄稼和如何烹饪，而是只需对着设备大喊“食物！”，食物就会自动送来，那会怎样？无人机送达？如果我们只需想“披萨！”它就会在我们眼前打印出来，那会怎样？

Why does the nature of technology inevitably eliminate human learning? The journey from infant to adult is a painful process during which learning adapts us to the inconveniences of the world around us. But what if we could adapt the world, remove all those pesky inconveniences, and reduce our need to learn entirely? What if, instead of having to learn to grow crops and how to cook, we could just yell at a device ‘Food!’ and food would arrive by drone? What if we could merely think ‘pizza!’ and it would be printed before our very eyes?

这支命运之箭会消灭学习，而驱动它的是最根本的驱动力——动态平衡。学习是一种成本，而动态平衡则力图消除它。

This arrow of destiny eliminates learning, driven by the most fundamental drive of all – homeostasis. Learning is a cost, and homeostasis seeks to eliminate it.

当我们所有的知识都仅仅包含在图书馆中时，我们很容易忽视其轨迹：将知识外部化似乎不是一个糟糕的想法，因为我们仍在阅读和撰写书籍，以创造更多的文化产物。

When all our knowledge was merely contained in libraries, it was easy to overlook the trajectory: it didn’t seem such a terrible idea to externalize knowledge since we were still reading and writing books in order to build more cultural artefacts.

下一个重大飞跃是书籍不再需要我们作为其发展的载体。这发生在我们开始外化不仅仅是知识，还有能力的时候。

The next big leap was when books no longer needed us as hosts for their development. This happened when we began to externalize not merely knowledge – but capability.

知识现在可以以不再需要人工干预的方式发挥作用。首先是工业化，然后是人工智能和自动化，我们开始明白，它从来都不是真正的写作——事实上，写作只是一种需要被抛弃的“幼虫形式”。在我们当代文化中，写作本身正在消亡，人们写作越来越少，越来越多地使用表情符号、图片、声音和面部表情——很快我们就会回到历史上只有抄写员才需要写作的时代。

Knowledge could now have agency in a way that no longer required human intervention. First with industrialization, then with AI and automation, we began to understand that it was never really about writing at all – indeed writing was only ever a ‘larval form’ to be cast off. In our contemporary culture, writing itself is dying out, people write less and less, use emojis, pictures, sounds and facial expressions more and more – and soon we will return to the point in history where only the scribes needed to write.

塔姆斯所警告的那些“外部标记”将以二进制形式编码，并且大多数情况下只需要技术即可读取它们。

Those ‘external marks’ of which Thamus warned will be encoded in binary, and for the most part only technology will need to read them.

当然，并不是每个人都以同样的方式与技术保持着这种关系——在可预见的未来，我们需要的专家数量将越来越少，但就像 Pied Piper 的故事一样，越来越多的人会发现自己被抛在后面。技术并不以同样的方式需要我们每个人。

Of course not everybody is locked in this relationship with technology in the same way – for the foreseeable future we will need dwindling numbers of specialists, but rather like the Pied Piper story, more and more people will find themselves left behind. Technology does not need each of us in the same way.

绩效指导系统

Performance guidance systems

如果你想知道学习领域的下一个重大事件是什么，那就是绩效指导系统。我们目前看到的是思想解放、决策外化的下一个进化步骤。

If you are wondering what the next big thing in learning is – it’s performance guidance systems. What we are seeing currently is the next evolutionary step in the emancipation of ideas, the externalization of decisions.

一旦所有知识都外化了，下一步就是将决策能力外化。毕竟，决策是我们投入精力的一项投资。像谷歌这样的基于资源的系统只是有限的——它们仍然需要我们搜索信息，决定相信哪些信息，并根据这些信息采取行动。

Once all knowledge was externalized, the next logical step was to externalize decision-making capability. A decision is, after all, an investment of energy on our part. Resource-based systems like Google are only so useful – they still require us to search for information, to decide which information to believe, and to act on it.

相比之下，卫星导航（GPS 系统）等系统则不需要这些东西：一旦你决定信任该设备，它会告诉你该做什么、什么时候做——然后你就会毫不犹豫地照做。好吧，差不多。如果你要开车驶入湖中，也许就不需要这么做了。但如果你开的是一辆自动驾驶汽车呢？

By contrast, systems such as satellite guidance (GPS systems) require none of these things: once you have made the decision to trust in the device, it tells you what to do, when to do it – and you follow it unquestioningly. Well, almost. Perhaps not if you are about to drive into a lake. But what if you are in an autonomous car?

此类系统的吸引力恰恰在于它们减少了我们的认知努力。我们用能力换取了体内平衡。我们用舒适换取了力量——而力量则被技术所取代。

The appeal of such systems is precisely that they reduce cognitive effort on our part. Homeostasis is traded for capability. Our comfort is traded for power – which passes to technology.

因此，稳态决定了命运的方向。技术不是故事的一部分，技术就是故事本身——我们只是其中的次要角色。资本、宗教、政治、气候变化仍然是稳态不断上升的故事中的参与者，而技术是其最新的化身。这个故事延伸到目之所及之外，从原始汤到人类的末日。

So it is homeostasis that determines destiny’s direction. Technology is not part of the story, technology is the story – one in which we play a minor role. Capital, religion, politics, climate change remain players in a story of relentless homeostatic ascent whose latest incarnation is technology. This story stretches as far as the eye can see and beyond, from the primordial soup to the end of humanity.

在你的一生中，你将见证大量技能的流失，决策能力的大量下降，就像过去几代人见证人类知识的分类一样。指导我们每一个想法的系统——从看什么节目到投票给谁——将主宰我们的存在。在很大程度上，它们已经主宰了我们。

In your lifetime you will witness a vast de-skilling, overwhelming offloading of decision-making capability, just as past generations witnessed the cataloguing of human knowledge. Systems that guide our every whim – from what to watch, to who to vote for – will dominate our existence. To a significant degree they already do.

作为学习专业人士，我们将在这个故事中扮演重要角色：我们将创造资源，使人们能够实现更高的绩效水平。不走这条路的组织将遭受更高的资源成本，并难以竞争。反过来，他们将把指导系统视为自动化的垫脚石。

As learning professionals, we will play an important part in this story: we will create the resources that enable people to achieve higher levels of performance. Organizations that do not tread this path will suffer higher resourcing costs and struggle to compete. In turn, they will look to guidance systems as a stepping stone to automation.

这从来都不是关于我们，也不是关于写作。命运之箭由药物决定——药物也是毒药。写作已经脱去外皮，露出了技术本身；当我们退化为婴儿时，写作已经成长为成年人。

It was never about us, nor was it about writing. The arrow of destiny has been determined by the pharmakon – the cure that is also a poison. Writing has shed its skin and revealed itself to be technology; growing into adulthood even as we shrink into our infancy.

未来将继续被这种趋势所主导：技术将减少我们学习的需要，使我们的生活体验更加顺畅，直到我们几乎所有的愿望都能在不费吹灰之力的情况下得到满足。在不久的将来，技术将能够在没有我们帮助的情况下成倍发展——任何活着的人都无法理解这种状况。

The future will continue to be dominated by this trend: technology will reduce our need to learn, smoothing our experience of life until almost all our desires are satisfied instantaneously without the slightest effort. At some point soon, technology will be able to evolve exponentially without our help – and it is impossible to say anything about that state of affairs that could be understood by anyone alive.

我所批评的哲学家们煽动了这些发展：柏拉图、笛卡尔——甚至是悔过的维特根斯坦——都钦佩这种外来的、反人类的寄生虫——在写作和逻辑中培育它度过它的幼年时期，鼓励它传播，使它成长为具身技术。我担心这是不可避免的，而且一直都是。

The philosophers of which I have been so critical fanned the flames of these developments: Plato, Descartes – even the repentant Wittgenstein – admired the alien, anti-human parasite – nursing it through its infancy in writing and logic, encouraging its spread, enabling it to come of age as embodied technology. I am afraid it is, and always was, inevitable.

如果这听起来像是世界末日的预言，请放心，你这一生没什么可害怕的：相反，你会看到科技让你的生活更加舒适，体验更加无缝，速​​度大大加快。你最基本的愿望将立即得到满足。

In case this sounds like apocalyptic doom-mongering, rest assured that you have little to fear in your lifetime: on the contrary, you will see a considerable acceleration of the pace at which technology makes your life more comfortable, your experience more seamless. Your most basic desires will be satisfied as immediately as you can think of them.

尽管如此，我们还是忍不住要问：“但技术到底想要什么？”你现在的观点可能是，技术只想要我们希望它想要的东西：优化特定结果，例如浏览量、点击量或产品销量。但蚂蚁想要的东西与巢穴想要的东西不同。看看你自己的身体：一个由简单细胞组成的高耸大都市，每个细胞只想生存，但集体想要的远不止这些。

Despite this, it is hard not to ask: ‘But what does technology want?’ Your current view is perhaps that technology only wants whatever we want it to want: to optimize for a certain outcome, such as views or clicks or sales of products. But what the ant wants differs from the nest wants. Look at your own body: a towering metropolis of simple cells, each wanting only to survive, but collectively wanting so much more.

因此，虽然单个算法的野心可能有限，但很难说出整个技术想要什么。我们只能观察到它希望变得更加强大并不断扩大其影响力，并且它将继续以指数级的方式这样做。

So whilst an individual algorithm may have limited ambitions, it is much harder to say what technology as a whole wants. We can only observe that it wishes to grow more powerful and perpetually extend its reach, and that it will continue to do so in an exponential fashion.

一点时间旅行

A little time travel

让我们来看看技术对我们当前体验世界的方式产生了哪些影响。

Let’s take a look at some of the things technology is doing to the way we experience the world right now.

想象一下，你希望很多人喜欢你在网上发布的服装视频。你之所以希望如此，是因为你是一只社交猿，当你的群体成员喜欢你时，你体内会产生积极的奖励化学物质。

Imagine that you want lots of people to like the video of the outfit that you have posted online. You want this because you are a social ape, hard-wired to experience positive bursts of reward chemicals when members of your group like you.

但人总是令人讨厌且难以预测——如果你能简单地创建数字版本的人，并可靠地为你提供积极的反馈，那会怎样？那衣服本身呢：衣服要花钱，送货需要时间，而且可能不合身。如果你只需点击一个按钮，就能显示自己完美的着装，并避免实际准备的所有不便，那会怎样？

But people are annoying and unpredictable – what if you could simply create digital versions of people that reliably provide you with positive feedback? How about the clothing itself: clothing costs money, takes time to be delivered, and may not fit correctly. What if you could simply click a button to display yourself perfectly attired, and avoid all the inconvenience of actually getting ready?

当然，你的身体本身就是物质世界的一部分，塑造它需要付出努力，需要节食和锻炼。创建一个你自己的数字副本——一个化身——它会变得容易得多，它可以变成你想要的任何形状。

Of course your body itself is part of the physical world and shaping it is effortful, requiring dieting and exercise. How much easier it would be to create a digital copy of yourself – an avatar – that can take any form you wish.

你可能认为这不过是欺骗而已；如果你去约会却发现你的伴侣与自己理想中的网上形象完全不同，那会是什么感觉？但为什么要去约会呢？这很麻烦，不是吗？如果你能使用虚拟现实和触觉模拟器将体验数字化，双方难道不能享受到他们所希望的体验吗？

You might think that this is little more than deceit; how would it be to turn up for a date only to discover that your partner looks nothing like their idealized online representation? But why turn up for a date at all? It’s a lot of hassle, isn’t it? If you could digitize the experience using virtual reality and haptic simulators, could not both parties enjoy precisely the experience they hoped for?

当然，无论一个人表现得如何，总有可能表现得粗鲁或不合作；所以让我们让人工智能扮演完美伙伴的角色吧……

Of course, however someone appears there is always the possibility they will be rude or uncooperative; so let’s have AI play the role of perfect partner instead…

数字技术代表着我们组织周围世界的能力发生了重大变化，因为现在世界上许多物理事物都可以数字化，而数字事物比物理事物更容易控制。与现实世界不同，数字世界不会“反推”；相反，它会以我们希望的任何形式出现。

Digital technology represents a step change in our ability to organize the world around us because many of the physical things in the world can now be digitized, and digital stuff is easier to control than physical stuff. Unlike the real world, a digital world doesn’t ‘push back’; instead it takes any form we wish.

但当我们忙于用鼠标点击来享受数字化的完美生活时，我们可能会意识到来自现实世界的另一个干扰源——新闻。新闻可能会破坏我们完美平衡的内心状态：我们可能会听到、看到或读到与我们的信念不一致或打乱我们计划的事情。新闻试图让我们看到世界的本来面目，因此很可能导致不和谐和不平衡。

But while we are busy clicking our way through our digitally perfected life, we may become aware of another source of disruption emanating from the physical world – news. News risks disrupting our perfectly balanced internal state: we may hear, see or read things that are discordant with our beliefs or which upset our plans. News is an attempt to get us to see the world as it really is, and as such is likely to lead to dissonance and disequilibrium.

正如我们在前几章中看到的，人们可能看不到世界的本来面目。举个例子：我们都有不顺心的日子，对吧？你有没有感觉不太对劲的日子？我要告诉你一个秘密：没有人会注意到。

As we’ve seen in previous chapters, people may not see the world as it is. Here’s an example: We all have off days, right? Do you have days when you don’t feel quite yourself? I’m going to let you into a secret: nobody notices.

早在 20 世纪 70 年代，斯坦利·米尔格拉姆（没错，就是那个电击专家）就曾试验过“Cyranoids”。Cyranoids 是一个虚构的词，用来形容那些说别人的话而不是自己的话的人——就像电影《罗克珊》的原型——《大鼻子情圣》中的那个角色一样。

Back in the 1970s Stanley Milgram (yes, the electric shocks guy) was experimenting with ‘Cyranoids’. Cyranoids is a made-up word to describe people who – like the character from Cyrano De Bergerac on which the movie Roxanne was based – are speaking someone else’s words rather than their own.

例如，米尔格拉姆会给儿童和成人戴上耳机，让教授口述 12 岁儿童的反应（有点像汤姆·汉克斯在《长大》中的反面）。米尔格拉姆引导他的赛拉诺伊德与人们（例如老师）进行一系列互动，要求他们观察、评估等等。请记住，本质上，他们每个人都表现得好像耶鲁大学教授被困在自己的身体里。

So, for example, Milgram would give earpieces to children and adults and have a professor dictate responses to a 12-year old (a bit like Tom Hanks in Big in reverse). Milgram steered his Cyranoids through a series of interactions with people – such as teachers – who were asked to observe them, assess them and so on. Bear in mind that – essentially – they were each acting as if a Yale professor were trapped in their body.

几乎没有人注意到他们有什么异常。

Pretty much nobody noticed that there was anything odd about them.

这应该让你感到不安：它提出了这样一种可能性：你一生中从未有人真正看到或听到过“你”的真实面目。相反，人们只看你一眼，就决定了他们对你有什么期望，几乎忽略了任何不符合他们刻板印象的东西。

That should unsettle you: it raises the possibility that you live your entire life without anyone ever actually seeing or hearing ‘you’ as you really are. Instead, people take one look at you, decide what they expect of you and pretty much ignore anything that doesn’t fit with their stereotype.

这只是众多实验中的一个，这些实验表明，在很大程度上，我们并不是按照世界的本来面目看待世界，而是按照我们想要做出的反应来看待世界。这种现象的范围从意识层面的“知觉定势”到认知层面的“确认偏差”。

It’s just one of a number of experiments that illustrate that to a large extent we don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we want to react to it. This phenomenon ranges from ‘perceptual set’ at the awareness level, through to ‘confirmation bias’ at the cognitive level.

对虚假新闻现象的研究证实了最近一篇文章中的论断：“人们会分享某些东西，即使他们知道它不是真的，只是因为它符合他们的价值观和信仰。” 3

Research into the phenomenon of fake news confirms the assertion in a recent article: ‘People will share things even if they know it’s not true, just because it fits with their values and what they believe in’.3

尽管全球范围内缺乏了解情感情境模型的人才，但从数字营销到政治影响等各个领域的实际应用却层出不穷。

Whilst there is a global shortage of people who understand the affective context model, there is no shortage of practical applications springing up in areas ranging from digital marketing to political influence.

假新闻之所以有效，是因为它反映了我们想要感受的东西。我们喜欢表情包（它体现了一种大众情绪），我们与有同感的人分享它们，这样他们也能感受到我们的感受（这也是我们讲故事的原因）。故事是否真实并不重要。

Fake news works, because it mirrors what we want to feel. We love memes (which encapsulate a popular sentiment) and we share them with other people who feel like us, so they can feel like we do too (this is also why we tell stories). It doesn’t matter whether they are true.

为什么我们的政治领袖撒谎那么多？因为他们知道人们想要感受的才是最重要的。他们努力通过民意调查和焦点小组来实现情感一致性。

Why do our political leaders lie so much? Because they know that what people want to feel is what really matters. They strive to achieve affective coherence through polls and focus groups.

这本身并不是什么新鲜事——在整个人类历史中，我们一直在寻找能够证实我们感受的事物——只是现在我们拥有了创造它们的难以想象的力量，我们距离实现阿拉丁的精灵只有一步之遥。

In itself, this is nothing new – throughout human history we have sought out things that confirmed the way we felt – only now we have the unimaginable power to create them, we are only a short step away from realizing Aladdin’s genie.

因此，虚假新闻并不是一个我们会逐渐摆脱的文化“阶段”，而是我们与技术达成协议的必然结果：我们周围的世界正在被全面数字化。随着技术重塑一个更符合你胃口的世界，现实逐渐退居次要地位。

Fake news is not, therefore, a cultural ‘phase’ we will grow out of – it is an inevitable consequence of the bargain we have struck with technology: the world around us is being digitized wholesale. Reality recedes into the background as technology recreates a world that more closely matches your appetites.

我们过去常常为撒谎感到难过。但在这个你可以破坏权威的世界里，你可以说：“我们厌倦了专家”和“你们是假新闻！”，没有人需要为任何事情感到难过。这就是秘诀：消除权威。一旦你质疑了受人尊敬的新闻机构的地位，你就可以肆无忌惮地说人们想听的话。

We used to feel bad about lying. But in a world where you can undermine authority, where you can say: ‘We are tired of experts’ and ‘YOU are FAKE NEWS!’, nobody has to feel bad about anything. That’s the secret: remove the authority. Once you have called into question the status of respected news agencies, you can say whatever people want to hear with impunity.

在你惊恐地举起双臂之前，这个世界已经充斥着这样一些观点，它们存在的唯一原因是符合我们想要感受的东西——从来世到好莱坞故事情节。

Before you throw up your arms in horror, the world was already awash with views that exist only because they fit with what we want to feel – everything from the afterlife to Hollywood storylines.

主流媒体让当权者掌控我们的感受。互联网让我们可以随心所欲地感受，而当权者则利用越来越准确的数据来满足这些感受，这些数据揭示了我们关心的事情。

Mainstream media allowed people in power to tell us how to feel. The internet allows us to feel however we want to feel, and the people in power to feed those feelings thanks to ever more accurate data revealing the things we care about.

当我们回顾进化史时，一贯存在的问题是现实：世界并不完全按照你的意愿运行，这迫使你去适应，这是费力的——甚至是痛苦的——需要你学习和改变。这是对世界“只是一场梦”这一观点最简单的驳斥：如果世界只是一场梦，事情就会一直按计划进行。

As we peer back through evolutionary history, the consistent problem is reality: the world doesn’t behave exactly as you would like it to, and this forces you to adapt which is effortful – even painful – and requires that you learn and change. This is the simplest form of refutation of the idea that the world is ‘just a dream’: if it were just a dream, things would always go to plan.

正如我上面所解释的，我们头脑中发生的事情很像梦——但梦总是被令人不快的现实所打断。这这种混乱和不和谐最终塑造了我们，推动了个人学习和文化进步。

As I have explained above, what happens in our heads is much like a dream – but a dream is constantly disrupted by an objectionable reality. This disruption, this dissonance, is what ultimately shapes us in a process that drives individual learning and cultural progress.

人类历史的箭头指向改变世界以缩小这一差距——减少我们改变、学习或付出努力的需要。

The arrow of human history points towards changing the world so as to narrow this gap – to reduce the need for us to change, learn, or expend effort.

结束语

In closing

哲学家弗里德里希·尼采写道：“我们应该认为，没有至少一次跳舞的每一天都是浪费。我们应该认为，没有伴有至少一次欢笑的每一个真理都是虚假的。” 4

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: ‘We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.’4

由于一些相当暴力和怨恨的哲学家，我们开始相信理性和情感是分离的，讲故事和游戏是幼稚和轻浮的，情感是需要理性来掌握的东西。

Thanks to some rather violent, resentful philosophers we have fallen into believing that reason and emotion are separate, that storytelling and play are childish or frivolous, and that emotion is something to be mastered by reason.

这是一个谎言，相信它让我们误入歧途。它破坏了我们与世界、与其他生物以及我们自己的关系。我们忽视了学习，并用教育来掩盖它。我们现在陷入了与技术之间有害的关系，这种关系承诺随着每一天的流逝，世界将变得更少挑战 — — 以换取我们的发展。

This was a lie, and believing it has led us astray. It has corrupted our relationship with the world, with other creatures, and with ourselves. We have neglected learning and paved over it with education. We are now trapped in a toxic relationship with technology, one which promises a less challenging world with every day that passes – in exchange for our development.

我们这些关心人的人，可能会用资源来协助技术的进步，或者用挑战来促进人们的发展。

We, the people who care about people, may assist the progress of technology with resources or further the development of people with challenges.